Child-free planes
Hours of screaming: video fuels discussion about noisy children on planes
Screaming children on an airplane are a challenge for everyone: parents and bystanders.
© AndreyPopov / Getty Images
In a viral video, a passenger shares his suffering with the world: According to his own statements, he sat on the plane for what felt like forever – together with a screaming child. That sparked a debate about whether there should be child-free fliers.
Long-distance flights get on your nerves – especially in the wood class, which is usually much too narrow and full. If there is also a screaming child, it becomes a real challenge for many people to keep calm – or to find it. The musician Henry Beasley suffered a particularly difficult fate in this regard. According to his own, probably slightly exaggerated statements, he sat on the plane with a screaming child for 29 hours and filmed his martyrdom.
Like a whistling teapot
He wrote: “Rate my 29-hour flight to Berlin”. A record-breakingly loud child can be heard in the background. It continues – Beasley acknowledges the achievement of the children’s lungs while his eyes twitch nervously. The musician compares particularly long screams to a whistling teapot whose water is boiling. After apparently hours of nonstop screaming, the stressed-out passenger gave the performance an ironic 10 out of 10, “praising” the young passenger’s impressive stamina in particular.
The comments on the video include short remarks such as “scream back” or “I would have freaked out”, but also the wish for “child-free flights”. For the sentence “Honestly, there should be both child-free flights and flights with children” a user received more than 250,000 hearts.
Among them is a heated debate on how to solve the desire to fly without children. “Fly with a private jet,” is probably the most expensive piece of advice. The consensus seems to be that many would be willing to pay more to be able to exclude noise from children. Others, on the other hand, consider it a matter of luck whether you have peace and quiet on a flight or not – after all, there are enough adults who behave inappropriately, make loud noises or otherwise attract negative attention.
Some users jump to the parents’ side and describe that the flight must have been one of the worst for them, since it is infinitely stressful not being able to calm down a child and knowing that everyone is annoyed. A little more absurd is the advice not to go out in public if you can’t stand the presence of children.
The desire to fly without children is not new
Regardless of whether the flight actually lasted 29 hours (the longest direct flight in the world from Singapore to New York takes around 18 hours) or whether the child actually screamed the whole time: the desire for flights with an age limit is neither new nor does it appear to be affecting only a few people.
Already in August went another video on tiktok viral, where a screaming child on the plane was also criticized. She wrote: “Why aren’t there adult flights? I would pay so much more for it.” In fact, there is no public airline in the world that offers such flights.