On the flight back from Shenzhen to Beijing.

Flying is becoming a recurring theme of this blog. I guess it’s an inevitable consequence of being a frequent traveler. Especially an economy class traveler. I don’t think I’d have much to write about if I was in first class all the time. My, the champagne was especially good today!

Unlikely. As the stewardess said to me, you’ll get coconut juice and like it, white boy.

Chinese domestic carriers aren’t much for the “board the plane from the rear” tactic. This creates a huge incentive to board early as people fight for precious, overhead bin-space. Hence the monumental scrums that erupt at every boarding gate at a Chinese airport the moment the public address crackles into life. The gate, however, is as nothing compared to the scrum in the airplane aisles as people jostle and fight to cram ox-carts, professional football teams, yachts, and other “carry-on” luggage into the bins while other passengers jam up behind them and frustrated stewardesses try desperately to bend space, time and suitcases. So what you end up is not so much a smooth boarding process, but a rippling wavefront of anger and snarkiness that rolls down the aisle and, if you are unlucky, breaks over your head in the form of a falling Louis Vuiton knockoff bag packed with bowling balls.

The incentive to board early is driven by what appears to be widespread, institutional distrust of the luggage check-in system. Consequently, everybody, and I do mean everybody, brings a rolling trolley bag, in addition to a handbag or laptop bag. Some of these trolley bags can be considered carry-on size only by the most spectacular leaps of self-delusion.

I do not carry a rolling trolley bag. I carry a flexible suit bag that can be folded into funny shapes easily crammed into miscellaneous spaces and an old bike messenger bag into which I can put a whole bunch of junk, including my laptop computer, but which does not scream "laptop bag, please steal me!"

Some simple math (Imagethief is incapable of complex math) illustrates the problem nicely. As I write this, I am sitting in the economy class section of an Air China 737 (the air conditioning system of which has just failed spectacularly). I count 18 rows of six people each, or 108 passengers, as the plane is full. Each overhead bin covers two rows on one side of the aircraft, or six people. However, by my observation, an overhead bin can accommodate at most only four rolling trolley bags, and often just three. In the great game of musical bins, this leaves at least 33% of all passengers, or about 35 people, with nowhere to put their bags.

Hilarity ensues as the increasingly brittle stewardesses attempt to convince the unlucky losers to submit their precious bags to the indignity of check-through. Much squawking, flapping of arms and futile cramming is the result.

When the last bag is stowed or sent below, and the passengers all seated, the sense of relief and serenity is palpable. It’s as though everyone took a Valium at once. The stewardesses all take on an expression like that Hercules must have worn as he enjoyed a well-earned smoke in the first moments after sweeping the last ball of horseshit from the Augean stables.

Speaking of excreta, in a true olfactory bonanza, the lavatories on this flight appear to be flushing with sewage water re-circulated from the waste tanks. No joke. I had no idea this was even possible. I am intensely grateful to be sitting in row seven, well clear of the ripe miasma.

Coda: This plane flight featured one of the all-time great runway charges, in which passengers believe the aircraft is at the gate, empty all the bins and surge toward the front of the plane. The stewardesses spent five minutes haranguing everyone back into their seats for five more minutes of taxiing, leaving the aisle blocked by several of the afformentioned trolley bags. If the plane had suddenly burst into flames we would have all cooked in our seats, unable to evacuate because my fellow passengers were incapable of detecting the difference between an airplane that is switched on, and one that is switched off.