
Airlines offer no-crying sections - Libertatea
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/airlines-offer-no-crying-sections-2013-08-23?siteid=rss&rss=1
======
idan
Whether airlines charge for this dubiously-implemented perk is meaningless.
It's a business transaction for transportation, end of story.

As a parent who has had the dubious pleasure of flying with children of my own
and experiencing the children of others, here's a far more important takeaway:

As shitty as it is for you to experience a miniature crying human, it is ten
times shittier for the parents. The emotion you should be reaching for is
pity—for the child that can't communicate its desires, and the parents who are
desperately trying to divine what baby wants before dying under the weight of
every. single. person. staring. at. them.

As for the parents who apparently "ignore" their misbehaving kids—there are no
lack of poor parents out there, but more often than not, ignoring is the
fastest path to ending a tantrum ("don't feed the trolls"). It's doubly
difficult to do when a plane full of people are giving you the evil eye.

~~~
sentenza
I second this. If most parents are anything like me, they avoid flying with
their small children as much as possible. What a nightmare.

However....

Sometimes you just _have_ to fly somewhere. Anybody demanding that babies be
banned from airplanes probably doesn't realize that this would be a severe
discriminatory measure against women with small children that try to keep
their career from dying.

My wife had an important once-every-few-years scientific conference when our
daughter was one year old (and still breastfeeding). Being from Germany, it
was bad luck for us that the conference happened to be in Korea. It was either
don't go and miss out on countless opportunities or make two 12 hour flights
with the baby.

In the end I went along as a babysitter and we flew to Korea, enduring some
hours (fortunately not the entire flight time) of crying and stares.

Small children are a part of human life, and a noisy one to say the least. If
you have them and still want to build a career, you cannot always go for the
"I don't want to bother anyone" route.

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evadne
Just got off from a Singapore → Taipei Scoot flight today; sat in the quiet
zone. Compared with the other flight where a family placed their loud baby
right behind me, this is pure bliss.

I’ll happily pay up to $500 for guaranteed silence.

ps. Active noise cancellation might work; however you’re usually not allowed
to use electronic devices during takeoff or landing. Speaking from my
experience, babies don’t really cry when the plane is coasting, they’re
triggered by jitters.

Belated material — Malaysia Airlines bans babies from first class outright
[1].

[1] [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2009386/Child-
free...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2009386/Child-free-flights-
Malaysia-Airlines-bans-babies-class-cabin.html)

~~~
CaptainZapp

      Active noise cancellation might work; however you’re usually not allowed to use electronic devices during takeoff or landing.
    

Which is really not a problem, since I'd wager that you're awake anyway during
that period of the flight.

~~~
kevinrpope
If you're trying to focus on something it is a problem. I hadn't even
considered the sleep part of this, I was thinking about reading, programming,
etc, all of which will be derailed by a screaming baby.

~~~
CaptainZapp
Weird, for me it's exactly the opposite. I remember the horrors of an 11 hour
flight from LAX to AMS with a baby yelling away for the entire flight and not
a chance to sleep.

I hear you loud and clear, though. It just didn't occur to me that this could
be a problem for such a short period of the flight.

~~~
kevinrpope
Yeah, I've been lucky on my long-haul flights it seems. Different parts of
life, and different things to focus on. :-)

Maybe the low cost stated ($10-25) is because it's for such a short part of
the flight where you get the benefit.

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saidajigumi
Having used Etymotic in-ear headphones for well over a decade, I won't get on
a plane without them. As in, I once drove back to the office at 4am the
morning before an early flight because I realized I'd left them there.

Assuming you've got a good fit, they act as -25dB earplugs with no music
playing. Playing music at a moderate volume over that provides a huge masking
effect[1] to external sound. Cranky babies, loud talkers, aircraft noise, etc.
are all muted to nonexistent or at least very tolerable levels. About the only
thing that gets through in my experience is the "bass effect" of a child
kicking the back of my seat...

Other brands of in-ear monitors (IEMs) should work fine as well. The key is to
ensure you use eartips that provide a good seal and comfortable fit. Most
brands ship with different size tips, and you should make sure you can get
replacements in your size. The eartips do wear out and need replacement with
regular use. In my case, I mostly notice that they start getting oddly
uncomfortable.

[1] As in "psychoacoustic masking principle", also leveraged to "hide"
quantization noise in lossy audio codecs, ala MP3, AAC, etc.

~~~
CamperBob2
This. What kind of moron gets on a plane without earplugs or earphones?

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Mc_Big_G
I just arrived from a 12hr+ flight from Madrid to SF with 2 babies just behind
me that literally, in the correct sense of the term, screamed the entire
flight. I'm a tolerant person, but banning babies, or having no-baby flights,
seemed like an extremely reasonable thing to do.

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ericHosick
Ear plugs and noise-canceling headphones (Bose QuietComfort for example) work
really really well.

Turn up the music/white noise to get past the ear plugs just a little bit.

No sounds get past this.

~~~
johansch
It gets quite tiring to blast high volume music or white noise for long
periods. (And the noise-cancelling is utterly useless for screams.)

~~~
stephengillie
_Why_ is noise canceling useless for screams?

~~~
nagrom
Noise cancellation tech works best for low-pitched constant-ish sounds, like
the airplane engines, or noise from a fan. Noise cancellation doesn't work
well on higher-pitched, oscillating sounds, like screaming or voices.

This is probably why the grand-old parent recommends earplugs in addition.

~~~
ericHosick
> This is probably why the grand-old parent recommends earplugs in addition.

Ya. Exactly. The noise cancellation works great to remove the engine noise.
But as soon as you turn them on, high-pitch sounds become a lot more apparent.
Earplugs help alleviate that.

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badman_ting
As tired as I am of screaming babies on planes, this seems silly. For one
thing a crying baby can reach WAY farther than 4 measly rows.

But mostly I get the impression that jerks like me did enough grumbling, and
this is a way for the airline to seem like they give a crap, which of course
they do not.

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mvikramaditya
This immediately reminded me of theoatmeal's cartoon on how commercial planes
should be laid out :)

link:
[http://theoatmeal.com/comics/airplane_layout](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/airplane_layout)

------
aubreyjohnson
Pretty lame for society to be so intolerant of children. Was everyone just
born into adulthood complete with manners?? Smh.

~~~
antiterra
Crying is, by its very nature and purpose, difficult to tolerate and ignore.
Even for loving parents, taking a baby on a flight can be incredibly tiring
and trying. What's wrong with offering passengers the chance to be a few rows
away from the noise?

~~~
tehwebguy
There is nothing wrong with this.

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guard-of-terra
I wonder why children cry at all. Isn't that evolutionary stupid to cry so
loud so much?

My only idea is that children cries is a side-effect of their brain
development.

~~~
tjtrapp
From what I know, the crying is due to the change in pressure that affects
babies inner ears during takeoff and landing.

~~~
vkou
Exactly. Taking a baby onto an airplane is equivalent to torturing it... And,
as a consequence, everyone around it.

~~~
scotty79
1000 times this. When airplane starts to descend my ears do funny thing. I
begin to hear everything like from under a meter of water. My ears also hurt
like hell. And it doesn't stop. On my first flight ever, I suffered for half
an hour waiting for this feeling to pass. No amount of swallowing helped. Then
I told my friend about it and he ssugested that I blow the air out through the
nose while holding it shut with my hand. Presto. I was back with the living.
If you could somehow do this manouver to an infant that started crying on
descent.... Otherwise you are funding him about an hour of really painful
torture.

This method is also described in that flight magazine on page 53 or something.
Should be on the cover.

~~~
Adrock
I've experienced this to different degrees in my travels. One time it felt
like I was being stabbed in the brain with an ice pick for the entire 6 hour
cross country flight and no amount of blowing/swallowing/yawning would help.

It's a form of Eustacian tube dysfunction:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustachian_tube#Disorders](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustachian_tube#Disorders)

My ENT recommends taking a hit of Afrin nasal spray during takeoff and again
just before descent.

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zw123456
I travel quite a bit for my job and I never leave home without my foam
earplugs, and by the way, I have found that for me, the foam earplugs open up
the ear canal and help with the cabin pressure changes on the plane. Also,
they work great for getting to sleep in noisy hotels.

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WilliamSt
It would seem to me a much simpler solution would be for airlines to offer
earplugs on all flights. That way, babies can cry and businessmen don't whine.

~~~
rubiety
If smoking is a problem for non-smokers, would it seem like a simpler solution
to give non-smokers face masks?

Why should the burden of the negative externality lie on the recipient and not
the creator of said externality?

The market will sort it out. I would pay more, lots of people would pay more.
The demand curve speaks louder than words.

------
stephengillie
Why don't we have noise-cancelling technology for this yet?

~~~
cbg0
Oh, but we do: [http://www.amazon.com/Flents-Quiet-Please-
Plugs-50-Pair/dp/B...](http://www.amazon.com/Flents-Quiet-Please-
Plugs-50-Pair/dp/B001J4HB1C/)

------
erikpukinskis
If cigarettes are to be any guide, it won't be long before children are banned
from planes, children have to stay 50 feet away from hospitals, and eventually
most people stop having children at all.

~~~
stephengillie
We, as members of society, are putting less pressure on each other to
reproduce, probably because our society's tech level & processes can't support
many more humans than currently exist.

