Travelling with children in Business class can be fraught with peril. But it’s not just the children that can cause problems. Some adults flying in Business would prefer that there were no children. But few take matters into their own hands!
AFF member ermen had a strange experience recently while flying with his young children on a Singapore Airlines flight from Singapore to Hong Kong. Before take-off, a man seated nearby turned to ermen and asked him to make sure his daughters did not make any noise during the flight as he “needed to sleep”.
Before take-off whilst boarding a man in 11A comes up to me and says would you make sure your daughters are quiet for the flight because I need to sleep. Stunned, as this this is the first time encountering this sort of request in the dozens of flights with my daughters, I compose myself, smile and tell him “hopefully”. Threads from AFF / FT about narky passengers and infants in J start racing through my head. I could be the subject of a thread here!
He wasn’t overly rude so I wasn’t particularly offended – and he wasn’t nasty or giving me evil death star(e)s. Still I thought it was pretty brazen for someone to be so open and upfront, especially when nothing had even happened yet.
It turns out that this passenger was a doctor. ermen acknowledges that there may have been a good reason he needed to sleep on this 7.35am morning flight. But perhaps there was a better way the passenger could have handled the situation.
I find out later from the meal cart passenger manifest that said person in 11A was a “Dr XXX” – PhD or MBBS / MD I don’t know. I guess maybe Mr Dr needs to sleep to perform a crucial operation later that day, or maybe he was partying too late at Zouk the night before and was hungover, or simply scarred from his last flight with the nightmare toddler from hell. I certainly hope he was not a pediatrician – he would be better suited as a radiologist or a colo-rectal surgeon with that sort of children skills.
Many AFF members consider this behaviour incredulous. Sadly, some pointy-end passengers take the class out of Business class.
What an absolute entitled turd. We’ve flown plenty with our kids in all cabins – have never experienced this disgusting attitude.
I can’t imagine I’d be restrained either. This behaviour is just arrogant and rude.
However, some AFF members believe the request was reasonable.
Asking in advance to be mindful of noise is not unreasonable. By the time you get woken up it may be hard to go back to sleep again. Again, i draw on my recent flight experience, where such a request to the parents would have been very reasonable indeed.
Thankfully, in this case, a solution was found before the flight took off. The doctor moved to a different seat towards the back of the cabin and was never seen or heard from again. ermen does wonder, though, why this passenger chose a bulkhead seat (often allocated to parents travelling with infants) in the first place.
What do you think – was this passenger’s request reasonable or arrogant?
Join the discussion on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum: A tale of two children (in J)
