by Barb Cohea

A few months back I heard Ryanair, wants to add standing room only seats to its airplanes. Ryanair’s Big Burrito, Michael O’Leary, wants Boeing to design SRO sections.

As if we haven’t suffered enough. I still have flashbacks to a circa 1979 flight on Syrian Arab Airlines, and all their seats were the sitting down kind. Twelve hours, five stops, toilet doors secured with brocade ropes and a latrine periodically sending a creek trickling down the center aisle.

Praying to Mecca was soothing but each time the plane hit turbulence the religious in the aisle flew all over the place. Lunch and dinner were every type of black and green olive grown in the Middle East, a side order of hard bread and a cup of water. How I thirsted for a Jim Beam, but that is so not kosher on an Arab airline.

Eight hours in, the plane landed at stop number 4. According to my travel agent, Habib Walgi and Sons Ltd., it should have been Bombay. I didn’t really know; our pilot couldn’t speak any of the many languages he announced passenger updates in. Trusting in Mr. Walgi and his sons, when they said, “the fourth stop you get off,” I did.

Admittedly, there were signs I was not in Bombay (none of them in English). One: a modern passenger bus carried us to the terminal, two: military guards with automatic weapons were everywhere. The most obvious sign was the male employees in the passenger terminal wearing long flowing robes and those Yasser Arafat hats. That would be a brussa shirt, jellaba, and a keffiyeh with an akal.

At passport control I asked, “Is this Bombay?” When the immigration agent stopped laughing, pointing and calling all his colleagues over to regale them in Arabic, he wiped the tears from his eyes and politely told me, “No, this is Abu Dhabi,” breaking into hysterical laughter once more. I got an armed escort back to the plane.

There was also the flight on LOT Polish Airlines. Did you know all their flights used to stop in Warsaw? Yep, I spent a month there one week.

Flying American flights isn’t any trip to Disneyland either. Last time I flew, I had to BYOF, and eat it off the wax paper it came in with a spork I bought from the steward. My row companions stunk. Several people were dressed like they just took a cab in from underneath the bridge where they live. The guy in front of me reclined his seat into my lap and after I slapped him upside the head, I threatened him with a sexual harassment lawsuit. My luggage arrived two days after I returned.

I ain’t buying no ticket for SRO on a plane. The plan is a section of barstools with seatbelts around your waist. Something was said about poles to hang on to but I can’t confirm it. The way I figure—best case scenario—it’ll be people hunched over bag lunches, drinks balanced on their laps, reading the newspaper over the shoulders of the folks seated in front of them and finally spilling their drinks all over us.

I keep harkening back to the good old days of flight when I was the worst dressed one on the plane, and now I kind of miss the Syrians. Everyone ate, prayed the plane landed, and nobody got drunk. What’s a toilet anyway?

Cohea, a freelance writer, lives in Beaufort and can be reached by e-mail at a37_tao@hotmail.com.