I have found that traveling on domestic flights is a trying experience. This is true anywhere in the world, really. There is something about knowing you’re not crossing an international border that makes the whole experience slightly ‘bleh’. Gone are the complimentary peanuts, banished are the small TV screens that show you that one episode of Friends on repeat. In all likelihood these things have been locked away in the same dark, unknowable place where they hide the air-freshener.
I took a flight from Lahore to Karachi earlier this week. The trip was both for work and as a sort of bookend to mark the end of my time in Pakistan (don’t cry for me, Argentina…) for the next few months. The Lahore airport was fairly empty as I arrived in the departure lounge, and so I made my way to the ‘Elbow room’, which is a small little nook in the corner made to look like an 18th century Victorian study with a mini fridge.
What exactly are "hand written boarding passes"? How did the extra passengers put their luggage away? How did the trolley people come through the narrow aisles with the extra people?
While doing my morning ready, I came across an article on the Guardian website with Pakistan International Airlines written in bold judgmental letters across the headline. This didn’t portend good things obviously. Apparently the PIA is taking some serious international flak because a flight took off from here to Saudi with way more passengers than is legal, and the excess stood in the aisles the whole time. Like a bus.
The Saudis freaked out when they found out and the PIA became the butt of ridicule. Even I - who doubt that the PIA serves real food and has traumatic visions of Snakes on a Plane when I am traveling with the airline - didn’t actually think they could do this. Needless to say, I have some questions. How did the people get on an international flight? What exactly are “hand written boarding passes”? How did the extra passengers put their luggage away? How did the trolley people come through the narrow aisles with the extra people? Did they squat the whole time or suck in their stomachs like body dysmorphic models while the food tray came by? Most disturbingly, how did the airhostesses - usually so quick to tell you to put your damn seat back upright (“I’ll do it when I am good and ready, so back the hell off Shagufta!”) - not inform the pilot when they saw people just hanging around the aisle as the plane was on the runway?
The article also told me a whole bunch about PIA that I simply didn’t know. For instance, that they make a loss of $ 3 billion (!) a year, or that the government tried to privatise the airline but couldn’t get the vote through parliament. They then elucidated all the engineering disasters and plane crashes that the airline has been through and ended with a defensive and slightly officious quote from a PIA official.
Recent revelations on how a PIA flight traveled to Saudi Arabia have left Pakistanis in further shock
By this time I was boarding my flight, and was understandably oscillating between manic and terrified.
But it turns out the PIA doesn’t even fly most of its routes anyway. The plane I was on was a fly-by-night Turkish rental, the equivalent of an aviation Uber rental. Small and cramped, the plane was loaded to capacity. I had an aisle seat, but it was small and I could only either fit my left shoulder or right butt cheek in at the same time, so I spent the majority of the flight doing a weird seated twerking movement. I thought I had lucked out actually, because the middle seat next to me was empty. Right before the doors closed, though a woman in a niqab came up and stared at me through the slits in her eyes. It’s difficult to read the facial cues of someone who is decked out ninja style. You never know if they are smiling at you or mouthing “I’ll gouge out your innards” and most of the time you just have to toss a coin. Still I smiled and offered to get up. When I did, she sat in my seat.
“Oh no Ninja” I thought. “Not today.” She asked me to move to the middle seat and I told her ‘no’, to which she replied with some level of anger: an odd reaction if you’re trying to make someone do you a favour. Eventually we settled, Ninja and I, into a silent but constant war. You know the battle where you don’t speak but you share an armrest and so every two minutes there is a territorial game of “who owns this.” I defer to middle-seats, since I believe they should get both. I tried to keep my elbow away from her but despite this she made it clear that she did not want to be sitting next to me. Every time we touched, even a slight graze, she would recoil as if a hemorrhoid had gone off. It was deeply frustrating.
But we landed in Karachi and given the article I had read, that was reason enough to celebrate. Since it is now an option, next time it may just be easier to sit in the aisle itself…
