Making Holiday Travel a Little Less Horrid

By Steve Rushin

In 1970, when jet travel still had about it a faint whiff of glamour, a new European airplane maker decided to call itself Airbus. The name showed remarkable foresight, for four decades later, that is what commercial air travel has become:long-distance journeys via public transport.

You already know that, of course, if you're flying this month, as the six major airlines prepare to reduce flights and seats despite the heightened demand of the "holiday travel" season--a phrase that joins airline food and friendly skies in the pantheon of aviation oxymorons.

So the White House recently announced its plan to make commercial air travel more tolerable over the holidays. It will open unused military airspace in an effort to decrease delays and ensure that Santa isn't stuck circling O'Hare come Christmas Eve, in what President George W. Bush called travelers' "season of dread."

I have my own modest proposals to return air travel to its original upright position. Unlike a snack box or headphones or curbside check-in, they won't cost a dime.

Let's focus on small things that everyone can do right now. Forget luxuries like legroom or blankets or on-time arrivals. I'm asking that passengers wear shoes. Or at the very least, socks.

Call me draconian, but something about the flip-flopped guy next to me who clipped his toenails at 37,000 ft.--their crescent moons cartwheeling majestically into the aisle--turned me into a hard-liner on this issue.

If a barefoot man can't walk into Stuckey's, why can he sit next to me all the way to Sydney?

Let's abandon any hope of having an in-flight meal. Being fed on an airplane has become a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream. And that's O.K., because the Tupperwared leftover fumes rising from the row in front of me will tide me over till touchdown, thank you.

But--please, sir--may I keep the whole can of soda?

I feel like Oliver Twist at the orphanage for even asking. And whenever I do, I brace myself for Mr. Bumble and Widow Corney to leap out of the lavatory and sing, "More?! Catch him! Snatch him! Hold him! Scold him! Pounce him! Trounce him! Pick him up and bounce him!"

That, incidentally, is exactly what I'd like to do to the guy in front of me--the middle manager in the middle seat babbling into his BlackBerry. I'm happy that he just sold a gross of ball bearings in Shreveport, La., but the plane has landed, and I can hardly hear the flight attendant announce, "Welcome to San Francisco, where the correct local time is ..."

Note to airlines: correct local time is the only time I require. How often do you stop someone on the street and ask for the incorrect time in some distant city?

Under my plan, the airlines would modify their caste system, evidently modeled on ancient India's, in which Platinum cardholders board before Gold, who board before Silver and so on, until we odious hunchbacks in straphanger class are allowed to board, trailing our leashed chickens as they peck their way down the aisle.

My plan would give prison time to the passenger who stands in the aisle fastidiously folding his blazer--"like he's in the color guard at Arlington National Cemetery," comedian Dennis Miller once put it--before placing it in an otherwise empty overhead, defying you to crush it with your carry-on.

To the person seated in front of me: I am neither a barber nor a dental hygienist, so kindly remove your seat from my lap. My preferred countermove--training my air vent to blow directly onto your head, often agitating a brief flurry of dandruff--doesn't always work as a deterrent.

To the person seated behind me: When you hoist yourself up by my seat back, that seat back becomes a catapult, and I become its payload.

To the person seated next to me: It's called a tray table, not a changing table. Deep down, I think the lady with whom I once shared an armrest--the woman who changed her baby's diaper on the tray table during meal service--already knew that.

Such moments make it difficult to fathom that flying was once a wonderment--a miracle of sorts, to be above the clouds, borne aloft on blind faith and Bernoulli's Principle. And I firmly believe that, if we all pitch in, jet travel can enjoy a second golden age.

When pigs fly, you say? Well, that already happened seven years ago, when a woman brought her 300-lb. potbellied pig on US Airways and flew with it, first class, from Philadelphia to Seattle. So there's still hope.