Fausta’s blog looks at the latest (disputed) brainchild of progressive French thinking: Airbus passengers fly standing up!
Which, judging from the conceptual pictures printed in the Times UK, uses a harness and bar system similar to something you might find on a EuroDisney adult ride. Or, for the less sanguine, a personal caging system similar to something you’d find in a slaughterhouse, just before the spring-loaded bolt squares up the cranium.
For what it’s worth, Airbus is now disputing the report that it has been in discussions with Asian airlines to roll out the new space-saving accomodations, accusing the New York Times of misreporting the story.
Of course, one should remember that many French believe the New York Times and other western media sources similarly misreported 911—see, for instance, Thierry Meyssan’s bestseller 911: The Big Lie— so you might want to take their denials with a grain of salt. And a big glass of Saint-Estèphe Bourdeaux..
To assume the crash position, you’d have to be a left . . . I mean, a contortionist.
AbattoirBus!
Aren’t the French still looking down their noses at us for doing that to our al-Qaeda prisoners?
“big glass of Saint-Estèphe Bourdeaux”
Now THAT I can go for!
Reminds me of the old Saturday night live skit in which guest host Kyle Maclachlan plays a cowboy, singing a song about the slaughterhouse to the cows in the field.
“A conveyor belt will run ya,
To where a bolt through the head will stun ya,
Then they cut your feet off with hydraulic shears,
And you’re headed for the killing floor . . .”
Yippee ei ki ay!
Get along little dogie,
Your headed for the killing floor”
Or words to that effect.
Southwest still won’t answer my emails about inducing coma and then stacking passengers like cord wood.
Mucho DeNiro. I’m tellin’ ya.
Look, they weren’t terribly serious about the proposal, as le French often just explore the existential potential of getting people to accept and actually pay for their absurd dehumanization. French cuisine, deVillepin, and ratification elections are the usual ways, but why not transportation?
Makes heading to Ellis Island in steerage sound positively dreamy.
And women have to stand in the loo, also.
And I thought People’s Express airline was the “cattle car in the sky.”
Why shouldn’t they fly standing up? I’ve seen their women and I’m pretty sure they sleep standing up.
McGehee, does that mean you’re not allowed to tip them?
If the story hadn’t been about Asian airlines, I might have believed it a little. Asian airlines rock, they have the best service and amenities you could imagine. I’d be more inclined to believe Northwest is developing a plan to put kids in with the cargo.
Wish I had the links—this proposal goes back a ways. Thirty years that I know of.
Don’t worry about “crash positions”. The whole point of this is to cram people close together; with padding on the back of the seat in front of you, you’d essentially be cocooned. Forget using your laptop, of course. The original idea featured a foldout ledge just big enough for a drink cup.
It actually makes an ugly sort of sense for the bounce-hops typical in Europe. How long are you in the air between, e.g., Paris and London? Paris to Kyiv is two hours, IIRC, and that’s a long flight by European standards. Most people can stand up for that long, and getting more people on the plane means less cost per head and therefore cheaper tickets.
As a bonus, it will help with energy supply. Juan Tripp will spin in his grave with enough force to provide electric power to five or six thousand typical homes.
The downside I see is that if you double the number of people on the airplane you also double the time needed to board and deplane. Tripp’s original idea was multiple jetways, which is why the 747 has so many big doors, but no airport in the world has ever gone beyond one for First Class and one for everybody else, and most of them load every plane the same, through a single jetway. Add that to all the anvil salesmen with two weeks’ worth of changes of clothes and their sample cases to be stowed in the overhead bins, and the budget for a typical flight might be:
Checkin: 30 minutes
Clear security: 1 hr
Board aircraft: 2 hr
Wait on runway: 1 hr
Flight: 30 min.
Wait for gate at destination: 1 hr
Deplane: 2 hr
I can hardly wait.
Regards,
Ric
The LA papers this morning are all over this and claim all the airlines are talking about doing it (and that the Chinese already are.)
The French are denying the whole thing now…
I don’t think it’s a bad idea, especially for short hops.
And though Ric is dead on about load times, perhaps this might force airports into the universe of multiple jetways, which would be better for everyone.
And come on, how cool would it be to get 747 people on a 747?