Every time I sit on an aeroplane there’s a moment between fastening my seat belt and take-off where I experience a surreal sense of disbelief at proceedings. The idea that this metal tube is going to lift itself off the ground and hurtle through the sky for hours just boggles my brain. The level of trust I’m putting into the people flying the machine, the certainty that every little piece of metal and wire and microchip is going to do its job, the deference to the small cabin crew and the authority with which they wield the tiny cans of coke and miniature trays of slop – it’s all just bananas.
I recently took a flight with a good friend who, while very well travelled, still gets nervous every time she boards a plane. To avoid looking at the plane and letting her fear build she likes to distract herself in the airport and get to the gate at the last minute – torturous for an anxious Aisling like myself – and then take off asap with minimal funny clunking noises from the undercarriage and no little jerks and bumps as we reach our cruising altitude.
I barely had time to stow my existential thoughts about air travel and she hadn’t even started to unclench her fingers from the arm rest when our thoughts were interrupted by a clunking undercarriage noise of a different type. Someone had unleashed a truly putrid fart. I caught my friend’s eye and immediately knew we both had the same terrifying dialogue running through our heads: we’re in for three hours of hell.
We are not to know how our organs will react to the cabin pressure and the bloated little sleeves of Pringles
Plane farts are part and parcel of air travel. It’s scientifically proven that the physics of flight and the biology of our bodies can create expanding pockets of air within our digestive tracts. Stewards notoriously use the excuse of cabin checks to “crop-dust” their passengers with excess gas. It’s just one of those pieces of dignity you surrender when you agree to engage in the convenience of flying.
That our fellow passenger had started dropping his own stinkbombs so early in the flight was a major concern, for once the plane farts have started they can be difficult to contain. A person I know, let’s call her “Femer”, once took a transatlantic flight where she was afflicted with great big gusts which mercifully were both odourless and masked by the roar of the engine. “Femer” did worry that her seatmate might feel the vibrations and demand that the flight be grounded, and she be whisked away for government testing. Luckily, he seemed too engrossed in either the episodes of How I Met Your Mother he was watching, or his own farting odyssey. Eh, according to my friend Femer, that is.
We were all horrified recently by news of an incident aboard a Delta plane where a passenger had a case of uncontrollable diarrhoea. There but for the grace of God went I. I was transported back to 2017 and an epic journey I made home from Cambodia via Charles de Gaulle in Paris with a developing case of dysentery. The packet of Arret ran out in the third hour of delays in Paris and I spent the flight home to Dublin in such a state of clenching that not even a bead of sweat dared leave my body.
When we board a plane we are not only at the mercy of the metal tube and the pilots at the control, but at the mercy of our own bodily functions. We are not to know how our organs will react to the cabin pressure and the bloated little sleeves of Pringles. When the seat belt light is on our bowels might have other ideas about when is appropriate to use the tiny bathrooms. I once witnessed a man start gently weeping on descent into Atlanta as he begged cabin crew to let him use the facilities. I wonder are crew trained to assess which is the bigger risk: letting the passenger use the toilet or letting the passenger unleash what he has to unleash cabin-wide.
Luckily, our neighbour on the flight kept their emissions few and far between. Obviously, we did some elaborate fanning with our safety information cards every time a stench emerged so it was clear we were not the originators. Hopefully their guts equalised by the time they reached their destination, or they were booked in for an urgent colonoscopy. The smell was as unnatural as the metal can hurtling through the air at 30,000ft.