It might sound funny in a juvenile way, but it just takes the uncontrolled flatulence of one impolite passenger to make the flight experience miserable for all the others.
I was recently on a long-ish flight of a few hours and there was a passenger, whom I could not locate, who every 15 minutes or so was freeing themselves of some poison.
The misery of the experience is difficult to describe, but I am sure that many will have felt something similar.
All it takes is one rude bully to turn what should be a miraculous experience, like flying ought to be, into a depressing one. Many parallels can be drawn.
What feels like a rude bully, could actually be someone with a terminal bowel cancer. And just as much as they could maybe find charcoal underpants, you could also bring a $5 R95 odor-eliminating mask on the plane. I'm not saying there aren't unavoidable terrible experiences, but most of the misery people in the developed world experience is a state of mind.
I am all for interpreting other people's behavior charitably, but I would consider the terminally ill passenger to be the exception rather than the rule.
A few months ago, I was in a bar with a date and heard a noise, as if someone had farted loudly. I thought, “How is that possible?”, and looked at the woman next to us who was leaning on a nearby table. While I was mentally filing the noise away as the loud movement of a chair, the nauseating smell that reached my nostrils made me realize that my benevolent interpretation was wrong and that the woman had indeed farted loudly in a bar during happy--but not for us--hour.
There are many people who lack good manners. And the advice to “protect yourself at all times” should be limited to the boxing ring, where people are willingly punching each other, and not to airplanes.
It's not about protection as much as finding ways to cope with things you don't like. People fart. It smells for a bit, but the smell (being a gas) will diffuse eventually. You can do other things to cope, like bring things to mask the smell, but you can also just... accept it. It's just a smell.
You could get all in your head, getting angry at the person who farted, why they farted, why they shouldn't have, how could they, how dare they, etc. But that's not reducing the discomfort. It's just adding anger, which creates stress, which doesn't feel good. You have the power to use tools or thoughts to control your own psychic discomfort. Identify the discomfort, cope with it, let it pass. This enables you to turn an otherwise miserable trip into a temporary inconvenience, less stress, and generally happier life.
Although seemingly enlightened, this is a terrible way to treat other people who don't respect your right to a normal existence.
When people say, “If it won't bother you in five years, why should it bother you now?”, what comes to mind is that if someone slapped you in the face during your morning walk, in 20 minutes the pain would pass and what would remain is this lingering experience in your mind of being disrespected, humiliated, treated like a fool by another human being. Nothing much, after all. You can identify the discomfort, cope with it and let it pass.
In 5 years, it would be nothing but a distant memory. It is just a slap, who cares? People do boxing Muay Thai and MMA and get punched, slapped, and kicked at any training session. How can you be bothered by somebody slapping you during your morning walk? Next time, you can bring your headgear if you don't want to feel pain for those 20 minutes. Not much of a hassle.
Following your reasoning, if you see someone letting their dog defecate, I don't know, on your lawn every day at 7:30 in the morning, you should just let it go, who cares, all animals defecate and you shouldn't bother. It would be like having a superpower that would leave you with a more peaceful and happy life, maybe with a collection of excrement on your lawn or maybe with you, or me, or anybody else kneeling to pick up that feces a few minutes after the fact.
It could be a good motivation to exercise and lubricate one's joints, after all.
It is a great way of thinking, but I am still among those who do not like to get slapped during my morning walk and don't appreciate dogs defecating on my lawn. Maybe I am old-fashioned.
What are you going to do about it? The farting, for example. You gonna stick a cork up their butthole? No; you're just going to sit their in your seat and feel upset. Doesn't really matter if you have some imaginary right or not. You're just stewing in your own mental hell.
The dog shit maybe you'll do something about, and maybe you'll call the cops over the slap, but I don't see how you're going to stop the farting. Maybe ask for another seat, or trade with someone. Or bring a mask on board. Or, barring that, maybe try to use your mind to diffuse the uncomfortable feeling. But otherwise you are just sitting in your own discomfort, feeling miserable. That's the point i'm making. You don't have to be miserable.
If I see where it is coming from, I am certainly shaming them for being disgusting, impolite, vulgar, and disrespectful to other people. I am not afraid of being confrontational. If the confrontation escalates, verbally, of course, so be it.
I don't share your passive acceptance of being treated like a fool by other people. There is not a single normal person in the world saying, "You know what, what we need now is somebody farting here".
As the British leader said: "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty".
Real change happens when people refuse to accept the erosion of their freedom and stand up against the abuses of others. Sometimes it is possible; other times, such as when it is not possible to identify the abuser, it is not, and we must carry on, but I hold close to my heart my right to indignation.
As I wrote before, many parallels can be drawn; it is not just about somebody gassing the other passengers on a plane. For example, using Bluetooth speakers in public spaces.
I recall that at work, I had a colleague who would put their bare feet on the desk, next to another colleague's. I told the affected colleague, who seemed reluctant to take a stand: "You tell them to put their feet down, get the respect you deserve". In the end, according to your Zen way of life, who cares? What are you gonna do, cut their feet? But I don't think I was wrong.
It is wrong to assume that it was a man. Second, yes, in the vast majority of cases, it is a voluntary action that should be frowned upon when performed in public. At least that is the case for me and the people I am familiar with and respect.
In the comfort of their own homes or the middle of the vast prairie, they can pass gas on their companions or poor herbaceous plants as much as they want.
I didn't expect such a strenuous defense of people who fart like cows on an airplane and make other people's lives significantly worse.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Flatulence is as much voluntary as sneezing, sure you can try to hold it in but 1) it's not always possible and 2) it might actually be bad for you.
And for some people it can just start happening out of the blue in the wrong moment.
I'm sorry, but it seems like you're talking to a bot, some kind of artificial intelligence entity, or an alien who has never experienced the sensation of having gas in their stomach.
After this attempt at gaslighting (how dare you complain about someone who farts every 15 minutes, out of the blue, during a 6-hour flight, spreading a nauseating smell throughout the plane and making the flying experience miserable for dozens, if not hundreds, of other passengers), I wonder if the times I held back from farting, I was tapping into some latent superpowers I didn't know I had. Or, by doing so, I was putting my health and the safety of my organs at risk, and it was only by some lucky coincidence that I didn't end up in the emergency room.
There's always a convenient rationalization for bad behavior. People screaming on a plane? Maybe they got fired, were having a nervous breakdown, and holding back the screams would have landed them in the hospital.
People singing at the top of their lungs during a flight? Maybe it's their way of coping with the stress of a breakup.
Or maybe they're just annoying people who were never taught how to behave in public.
Believe it or not, I think some of this excessive flatulence can also be blamed on the airlines trying to save cost. And I don't just mean on the "short rib and pasta salad."
I'm old enough to remember when passengers lit up once the No Smoking sign went off.[0] Whatever you may think about whether that's as rude as passing gas, it was much more socially acceptable (and probably masked a lot of farts).
So, a friend's father who was a career mechanic for American Airlines once told me that when smoking was banned on planes, the airline found they could drastically reduce the amount of bleed air they introduced to the cabin, thus reducing aerodynamic drag and increasing fuel efficiency. I don't remember by how much he said the fresh air was reduced, but it was something like an order of magnitude. Whereas in the smoking days, the cabin air was completely refreshed every 30 seconds or something, now it's like every five minutes.
The result being more germs and viruses floating around the cabin and, presumably, more recycled farts.
Maybe one of the airline folks on HN can confirm this, and also whether it's changed at all since Covid.
[0] Side note: On a recent flight, I had a bet with my companion about the No Smoking sign. She believed that it could not be turned off. I countered that there would be no reason to have an illuminated sign at all if it couldn't be turned off. Why waste the light bulbs? Just put a sticker there. Clearly they had a lit sign because some charter airline somewhere, or maybe a privately owned 737, might still allow people to smoke.[1] Anyway, we were sitting in the first row by the bulkhead, and a little while later the pilot came out for a coffee break. So I asked him to settle our bet. He said, "Watch the sign," and went into the cockpit. We watched it. Nothing happened. He came back out and asked, "Did it go off?" We said, "No." He grinned and said, "The switch is still there, but it's disconnected."
[1] I know the thing about the ashtrays in the lavatories being a safety measure, so that in case someone decides to smoke in violation of all common sense, at least they might not throw it in the toilet.
