I do not care what my friend Orville says. Watching a movie at 28,000 feet feels unnatural.
"Reeeeelaxxxxxxx," Orville told me before I set off from Australia to New Zealand in a jumbo jet. "Just sit back and enjoy the inflight movie."
Relax?
Enjoy it?
How the heck could I relax and enjoy it when:
a) As Orville knows, I am a nervous flyer. I hate hurtling through thin air in a metal tube, wings or no wings. Defying gravity just does not seem right to me and when I have sweaty palms and high agitation it is very hard for me to muster the concentration to work out how to buckle my seat belt let alone watch a movie way up there; and
b) I had already seen the movieanyway.
Cheaper By The Dozen stars Steve Martin (no relation) and is actually quite a poignant and funny movie. On the ground.
But, sheesh, how can you possibly laugh, or even allow other passengers to cackle, when you are trying to listen for tell-tale engine noises that are so distressing that, in the spirit of public mindedness, you think you really ought to go tell the captain about them?
Of course, this did not seem to worry my seven-year-old son Jack, who was sitting next to me on our family trip to Auckland for a wedding. I had taken him to see Cheaper by the Dozen last school holidays and, having not inherited my aeronautical discomfort, he seemed intent on sitting there and laughing at all the jokes again - but more loudly this time.
Thankfully, though, it was my chance for a bit of revenge.
I have lost count of the times Jack has annoyed the heck out of my wife Katherine and me from the back seat of the car when he has asked every single minute of a 500km trip: "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?"
Now he can tell his friends how I bugged him every minute of a 2000km plane trip by repeatedly asking him to look out the window and see if the left wing was still there.
"Wings don't just drop off," Orville tried to counsel me before the flight. "Reeeelaxxxxxx. By the time the movie ends you'll just about be there."
I admit that Orville knows an awful lot about planes. I expect no parents would ever name a baby Orville unless they knew he was going to grow up with a passion for aviation. You have heard about trainspotters? Well, Orville is a plane spotter. His idea of a good day out is to go to the airport and watch the Dash 8s, Air Buses and 747s come and go.
But just because he says wings do not just drop off, does not mean they don't.
It happens on the movies all the time, just not the ones shown at 28,000 feet.
I expect they veto those.
Somewhere there is a person in a room, possibly a secret underground bunker, whose sole mission is to watch movies and make sure they do not fall into the wrong hands.
This is why you have never seen the Poseidon Adventure on a cruise, the Towering Inferno in a high-rise motel or 2001: A Space Odyssey in a rocket.
Last year I spent five days in one of our local cardiac hospital wards where we had videos piped to personal telly screens.
I like movies that make me laugh and I was thrilled that between quality time with my cardiologist and his surgical assistants I would be able to watch movies billed as comedy on the program the nurse gave me.
But they turned out to be distinctly unfunny: Undercover Brother, Kangaroo Jack and all.
I was perplexed. You do not tend to get a lot of seven-year old heart patients, and, with apologies to the makers of those movies, I suspect they are the only people who would appreciate that standard of humour.
Then the penny dropped.
It was deliberate.
Why would they show funny movies to people with assorted surgical wounds anyway? They don't WANT them to laugh. Imagine how many clamps and stitches would be split and be hazardous to our health?
It is the opposite on aeroplanes.
Most passengers are encouraged to laugh along to movies to take their minds off the possibility of the wings dropping off at 28,000 feet.
Except for seven year olds. Their job is to look out the window.
©March 22, 2004, John Martin. All Rights Reserved