I read something on the net a month or so ago. It said “Six years after 9/11, airport screeners are getting pretty good at spotting terrorists — as long as they’re inept amateurs. Tests by federal agencies show, though, that there’s an excellent chance that anybody who has been trained to get past airport security – like, say, a member of Al Qaeda — will succeed.” However, I’m pleased to report, if you’re a normal traveler carrying a bottle of Coca Cola or a pair of scissors, you’ll never get past security unscathed. They’ve caught me with scissors (at Gatwick), a while ago, and they got me on the Coca Cola this time (in Houston). I’d forgotten all about the liquids thing.
“Waving the dead chicken”, as I noted in a previous posting, is the act of carrying out a meaningless ritual to satisfy “public opinion”. The security rituals at the airport are, imho, a good example.
Another good example is the complex ritual carried out on airplanes by air hostesses before take-off, which is usually announced by a voice over the PA that implores you to “listen to carefully” as though they were about to tell you the “Ten closely guarded secrets of how to win at Poker”.
So here’s the routine: “Those are the emergency exits, front and back” arms flailing about like a disco dancer doing the Makarena, and here is how to attach an oxygen mask to your face (you’d never work it out if they didn’t show you), and last of all, here is the life jacket – by which I mean of course, the plastic inflatable dead chicken.
Lifejacket?
Has an airplane ever dropped out of the sky, landed smoothly on water and then had the passengers don life jackets and one by one jump off the wings into the water? It may have, but I don’t think so.
And yet there’s a whole industry, somewhere out there in the world, making meaningless plastic inflatable dead chickens for the air hostesses to demonstrate to you in over 100 different languages, day after day, on thousands of air flights, many of which don’t even travel over water. And these lifejackets are expertly made, being exactly the right size to be stowed under airline seats. They have pull chords to inflate them, a mouth tube to blow into should the pull chord fail and a nifty little whistle to blow as you bob up and down in the water waiting for some handy search vessel or other to pluck you from the merciless waves.
It’s a comforting vision, but the truth is that if your plane drops into the drink you end up sleeping with the fishes.
I scanned the Internet to find any examples of any of these millions of plastic inflatable dead chickens ever seeing action. Yes there are undoubtedly millions of them and no, I could find no examples. What must it feel like to work in a factory making life-jackets that exist solely for the reason of making people believe, quite wrongly, that if an airplane comes down over the sea there will be some chance of survival? Imagine, for a moment, the owner of an inflatable dead chicken factory handing the business on to his son as he retires.
“Sebastian, you are my son and heir, and the time has come for me to pass the family business on to you. It’s always been a matter of pride to me that we make the finest plastic inflatable dead chickens in the world and I’m counting on you to keep up the family tradition. Our inflatable dead chickens are the highest possible quality and I’d like it to stay that way. In fifty years, they have never once anywhere in the world failed to still the groundless fears of nervous air travelers.”
And by the way, why not parachutes?
Shouldn’t we all have parachutes under the seat too, so that should an airplane break in half in the sky (and that has actually happened) you can pull the chute from under your seat, leap into the air, pull the chord and float gently to the ground. No matter that that’s as impossible a scenario to survive as a drop into the drink. It would surely make the air hostesses ritual a lot more entertaining. “And if you’re traveling with children, remember to strap the parachute onto your children first, and push them from the plane before you jump yourself”
This is one of a series of postings under the heading: The Journeyman
~ Mark Twain
