Don’t you just hate how the pilot, his co-pilot and sometimes even the flight attendants can’t keep their hands off the PA mic?

RECENTLY I’ve been flying – no, not flying in the superhero or even metaphorical sense but flying in the I’m-wedged-between-two-other-sweaty-humans-who-also-can’t-afford-business-class seats – and I’ve been flying this way a lot.

Now I’m not going to complain about lack of leg room, or seats that recline a whopping 4°, or about the re-heated and then re-heated and then re-heated-yet-again food, or the fact that Jennifer Aniston seems to have at least two movies showing on any given flight.

Nope, I’m cool – meaning, have come to terms with – all of these annoyances.

What I can’t stand and continues to irritate me is the constant stream of in-flight announcements, and the fact that these announcements interrupt the already hard-to-enjoy Jennifer Aniston movie I undoubtedly watch.

Seriously, I’ve been on flights where time seemed to slow to a crawl while the pilot and attendants dominated the tinny cabin speaker with useless announcements, all while poor Jen was paused, frozen in mid-sentence on my screen with one eye shut and her mouth half-open.

To be certain, we need in-flight announcements. We need to know that we’re going through a patch of turbulence and that we should sit down or we risk getting thrown about the cabin like a poodle in a cement mixer. We need information when one of the engines bursts into flames and the pilot calmly informs us not to urinate in our seats because we’ve got three other perfectly good engines (this actually happened to a friend of mine).

By all means, interrupt the horrendous rom-com I’m watching for any of those reasons. These aren’t the sorts of announcements I deem unnecessary.

It’s the other pesky ones.

Basically the flight starts with a completely useless address from the pilot. You know, the one where he mumbles into the microphone, sounding like he’s semi-distracted as he tells us our altitude, heading, time to destination, crosswind, and a myriad of other seemingly useful information over a speaker that sounds like it was stolen from a fast food drive-through.

Now I can imagine in a different time – say 1935 – this pilot’s address would’ve been great information; the only problem now is that in-seat screens display all the flight details, so all the pilot is doing is reciting information that most of us have already read four times over on the screen in front of us.

I suppose this pilot’s announcement is a relic of a bygone era and is sort of a tradition, but traditions can change. For instance flight attendants, the pleasant folk who have to put up with an in-flight-announcement-irritated passenger like myself, started out not only serving passengers but loading luggage, refuelling the plane, and even acting as mechanics. It’s probably a good thing that tradition has died. I feel much more comfortable knowing that the attendants aren’t moonlighting as airplane mechanics nowadays.

But some announcements aren’t about tradition, like the ones that announce the opening and closing of duty free shopping. Duty free shopping?

I’m in economy! Clearly, I barely have money for this flight let alone buying designer sunglasses or an overpriced die-cast paper weight of a 747 from your duty free store. Even more irritating about the duty free announcement is that the needless statement is repeated several times in other languages, meaning that the Jennifer Aniston rom-com I’m watching is starting and stopping like a breakdancer doing the robot.

And the powers-that-be help you if you’re on a flight going to or from Japan. Because then, what takes one minute to announce in English, Bahasa, or Mandarin, will take exactly four hours and 26 minutes in Japanese.

Really. I don’t know what the attendants are saying in Japanese – maybe they’re telling little in-jokes like “I think the guy watching that crappy Jennifer Aniston movie is getting upset by our duty free announcement” – but it always seems to take forever.

Suffice to say, I’m not real keen on in-flight announcements but as my godfather has told me many times, usually after listening to me complain too much: Don’t complain about something if you’re not ready to try to change it.

Well, I’m not really ready to change it, but I’ve prepared a solution. To avoid the tyranny of unnecessary in-flight announcements, one simply flies with a tablet, PC, MP3 player, and a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. Then you can play all the games, and watch the entire Jennifer Aniston library of romantic comedies, all without interruption (though you may suffer minor brain injury from watching that many Jennifer Aniston films but let’s deal with one problem at a time).

Yep, flying in your own metaphorical cocoon, you won’t be interrupted at all by pesky announcements or start and stopping entertainment. Yep, with noise cancelling headphones, you can be sure that you’ll be the passenger who’s completely unaware of your own volume as you shout your order at the flight attendants, and you’ll be the oblivious one who is constantly getting up to the use the toilet after turbulence has been announced so that the attendants must chase you down and escort you back to your seat.

And maybe that’s the real reason in-flight announcements persist, as a form of in-flight karma to get back at us, the obnoxious passengers.

Jason Godfrey can be seen hosting The LINK on Life Inspired (Astro B.yond Ch 706). Speak to him at star2@thestar.com.my.

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