The Thanksgiving Holiday is “the most heavily-travelled time of the year”. Always one to follow the crowd, my wife and I joined the throngs traversing the Friendly Skies this weekend.
Air travel has changed since my first experiences in the early 70s. In those days, airlines treated passengers as honored guests showering us with honey-roasted peanuts (insert Seinfeld joke here) and even changing those funky little headrest napkins between flights. Seats were spacious and aisles were roomy. We had to entertain ourselves with (gasp) books or magazines instead of DVD players and iPads, but at least we were comfortable.
That’s all changed now. Flights are crammed to the gills and seats are spaced the same as a Kindergarten classroom. For this trip, I was assigned a center seat in coach. On both legs, the person seated in front of me decided to take full advantage of that wonderful new invention, the reclining seat.
The 21st century has seen some technological wonders. Smart phones, fracking to retrieve natural gas, and Mitt Romney's hair come to mind. Still, the reclining seat trumps them all. The fine folks seated in front of me apparently had never encountered this marvel before and only returned to that so-20th-century full upright position when threatened with bodily harm by the flight crew.
I miss those honey-roasted peanuts and especially the headrest napkin, but the thing I’d really like to see again is adult-compatible seat spacing.
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