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Airlines offer no-crying sections
- stephengillie 13y agoWhy don't we have noise-cancelling technology for this yet?
- cbg0 13y agoOh, but we do: http://www.amazon.com/Flents-Quiet-Please-Plugs-50-Pair/dp/B001J4HB1C/ http://www.amazon.com/Flents-Quiet-Please-Plugs-50-Pair/dp/B...
- ericHosick 13y agoEar 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 13y agoIt gets quite tiring to blast high volume music or white noise for long periods. (And the noise-cancelling is utterly useless for screams.)
- stephengillie 13y agoWhy is noise canceling useless for screams?
- nagrom 13y agoNoise 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 13y ago> 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.
- ericHosick 13y agoThe ear plugs get around the need for high volume.
- aubreyjohnson 13y agoPretty lame for society to be so intolerant of children. Was everyone just born into adulthood complete with manners?? Smh.
- antiterra 13y agoCrying 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 13y agoThere is nothing wrong with this.
- andrenotgiant 13y agoWhat? Really? This is the main conclusion you draw from this article? Society isn't intolerant of children, society sees that there is a market for increased comfort in airlines, and that "peace and quiet" is an integral part of comfort. They aren't charging more for children to fly.
- cliffu 13y agoThat's the real solution, charge more for small children and use the extra charge to reduce prices of the seats nearby. It should be prohibitively expensive to bring a crying child on the plane.
- jaegerpicker 13y agoBS, Parents have to fly sometimes and upping the cost will do nothing aside from harming parents by making them pay more. It won't deter people from flying at all. Believe me as a Parent the airlines make it difficult enough to fly, that very few parents do it without a pretty compelling reason. Even if it did reduce the number of children on board, that's a worse solution than the problem currently is. Children learn by doing, including manners on planes. Remove a generation of children from anything and you'll have a generation that has no idea how to behave during that activity.
- zw123456 13y agoI 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.
- evadne 13y agoJust 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-flights-Malaysia-Airlines-bans-babies-class-cabin.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2009386/Child-free...
- CaptainZapp 13y agoActive 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 13y agoIf 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 13y agoWeird, 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 13y agoYeah, 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.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoI 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.
- pilif 13y agoIf the child is in a group of other humans, the louder it cries the more likely it is to be noticed. The more annoying the cry is to other people, the more likely it is to get help. Humans always lived in groups, so being loud and annoying has huge evolutionary advantages over being quiet.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoThey mostly cry without any reason watsoever. Even today children crying gets them shaken violently in some cultres. I can't imagine pre-historic humans to be more well-tempered and tolerant than today. It doesn't make sense.
- taway2012 13y ago> They mostly cry without any reason watsoever. Hmm, I'm guessing you are child-free? In my experience, it's not normal for a baby to cry for no reason. I'm only replying to present a diff. point of view in case people go away thinking it's normal for a baby to cry for no reason.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rayiner 13y ago> They mostly cry without any reason watsoever. Not really, it's just that we find it difficult as adults to empathize enough to understand what's bothering them. Children cry because they're hungry, because they've got gas, because they're sick or uncomfortable, because they're overstimulated, or because they're bored. Since they eat every few hours, have developing digestive systems, have developing temperature regulation systems, and have no internal monologue and short attention spans, one of these things becomes a problem very frequently. As they get older, they cry because they have no emotional regulation (something that isn't fully developed until after adolescence). If I snatch a candy bar out of your hand you were about to bite into, you feel that initial pang of loss but quickly your higher faculties regulates that emotion. If I grab a piece of "floor food" my 9 month old is about to put in her mouth, she feels that same emotional response, but there is nothing to regulate it.
- badman_ting 13y agoAs 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.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mvikramaditya 13y agoThis 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
- WilliamSt 13y agoIt 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 13y agoIf 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.
- erikpukinskis 13y agoIf 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 13y agoWe, 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.
- saidajigumi 13y agoHaving 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 13y agoThis. What kind of moron gets on a plane without earplugs or earphones?
- Mc_Big_G 13y agoI 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.
- idan 13y agoWhether 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 13y agoI 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.