The Trouble With Flying Is Other People

Lufthansa has put the unwritten rules of air travel on T-shirts. Which is probably easier than enforcing them.

There are, apparently, rules for flying.

Not the important ones. Those are printed on cards in the seat pocket and delivered by people in uniforms who would very much prefer you to keep your seatbelt fastened.

These are the other rules.

Who gets the armrest. When you should board. Whether you can recline. When you should stand up after landing. Whether, in a moment of unexpected emotion, you are permitted to applaud the pilot.

They are not laws. They are barely even rules.

They are the fragile little agreements by which several hundred strangers attempt to coexist inside an aluminium tube at 35,000 feet.

Lufthansa has now put them on clothes.

Its new Travel Etiquette Collection, created with agency Serviceplan, consists of seven limited-edition pieces — hoodies, T-shirts, caps and accessories — printed with reminders such as “middle seat gets the arm rest”, “it’s ok to clap when the plane lands” and the wonderfully optimistic “live, love, exit by row”. The collection is not being sold; pieces are being distributed through Lufthansa’s social channels and selected influencers.

It is a rather elegant solution to a problem that has defeated aviation for decades.

If you cannot make people behave, put the instructions on a sweatshirt.

Boarding is not a competitive sport

The first great misunderstanding begins at the gate.

An announcement is made for Group One and, within seconds, people from Groups Two through Six are standing.

Why?

Nobody knows.

Perhaps they fear the plane will leave without them. Perhaps they have spent too long sitting down. Perhaps standing makes the remaining wait feel shorter, in the same way that looking repeatedly at a delayed train is believed to accelerate it.

Lufthansa’s etiquette expert Clemens Graf von Hoyos recommends the obvious alternative: remain seated until your group is called. The airline’s campaign turns the sentiment into another wearable declaration: “Boarding by Group Hits Different.”

It does.

It means sitting down.

A revolutionary concept.

The middle seat deserves compensation

There is no international treaty governing the armrest.

There should be.

The window passenger has the view. The aisle passenger has freedom of movement. The person in the middle has been placed between two strangers and asked to pretend this is normal.

So the middle seat gets the armrests.

Lufthansa has chosen to state this not as an act of legislation but as an act of common courtesy.

It is a useful distinction.

Air travel contains enough regulations already. What it lacks is an agreed understanding that sometimes fairness means giving the other person the better deal.

Particularly when they drew the middle seat.

Recline, but look behind you

The reclining seat is another example of the strange gap between what we can do and what we perhaps should do.

The seat reclines. Nobody disputes this.

But Lufthansa’s advice is to look behind you before pressing the button, particularly if the passenger is eating or has belongings on the tray table.

This is not an argument against reclining.

It is an argument against behaving as though the seat behind you contains no human being.

A surprisingly large proportion of etiquette can be reduced to this principle.

Look.

Notice.

Then act.

The great post-landing migration

Nothing reveals our impatience quite like landing.

The aircraft reaches the gate. The seatbelt sign goes off. And immediately the cabin begins to rise as one organism.

People retrieve bags.

People put on coats.

People enter the aisle.

Then everybody stops.

The result is a perfectly engineered traffic jam in which everyone has surrendered the comfort of their seat in exchange for standing somewhere else.

Lufthansa’s answer is “Live, Love, Exit by Row.” The idea is simple: allow passengers ahead to leave before moving into the aisle yourself. It is intended to make disembarkation smoother, not to establish a new moral order.

There are, naturally, exceptions. Someone with a tight connection may genuinely need to get through.

But even then, there is a traditional technology available to us.

It is called asking.

And then there is applause

Few subjects divide civilised society more efficiently than clapping when the plane lands.

Some people do it.

Some people consider this deeply embarrassing.

Some people spend the rest of the flight wondering why strangers have applauded a routine landing while remaining silent about the miracle of aviation itself.

Lufthansa has wisely refused to take sides.

“It’s ok to clap when the plane lands” is one of the collection’s slogans. Von Hoyos considers it an acceptable spontaneous gesture, while those who prefer not to applaud are equally free to remain silent.

This may be the most sensible etiquette rule of all: You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. You simply have to tolerate the fact that they might.

The most important rule is not on the T-shirt

What makes Lufthansa’s campaign more interesting than a conventional list of airline do’s and don’ts is that it does not really present itself as a rulebook.

It presents etiquette as a conversation.

That matters.

Because the problem with travel etiquette is that the people most offended by other people’s behaviour are often the people least inclined to consider their own.

We complain about the passenger who stands too early, then squeeze into the aisle ourselves.

We defend our right to recline, then resent the person in front of us for doing exactly the same thing.

We demand consideration for our luggage, our schedule and our personal space, while quietly assuming that everyone else’s should be negotiable.

Flying exposes a particularly modern contradiction: we want absolute personal freedom in an environment designed around shared space.

The answer is not to eliminate every irritation.

It is to become slightly less irritating ourselves.

Perhaps the best etiquette is letting things go

There is a line in Lufthansa’s accompanying advice that deserves more attention than any argument about armrests.

Von Hoyos suggests that the highest form of courtesy can sometimes be overlooking other people’s bad behaviour.

That may be the hardest rule of all.

It is easy to be polite when everyone behaves exactly as we would like.

The real test comes when someone reclines too far, boards too early, takes longer than necessary to leave the aircraft or — unforgivably — applauds after landing.

Do we really need to correct them?

Probably not.

The cabin is already cramped. The flight may already be delayed. Everyone is tired. Someone’s child is crying. Someone’s connection is disappearing. Someone has forgotten where they put their passport.

Perhaps the final luxury of flying is not more legroom.

Perhaps it is restraint.

So by all means, give the middle passenger the armrests. Wait for your boarding group. Look behind you before reclining. Let the rows ahead leave first.

And if someone applauds when the plane lands?

Let them.

They may simply be pleased to be just be alive — or very impressed with the pilot.

We’re all slightly tired, slightly cramped and slightly convinced that our own inconvenience is the most important one in the cabin.

So perhaps our obsession with merchandise, marketing and social anxiety has its uses after all. If a hoodie can make us behave slightly better at 30,000 feet, who are we to complain?

Images in courtesy of www.lufthansa.com