Stuart Wolfendale

Bottoms Up!

 4500BC is when people first started living in Ningbo, China, they say and traditions must die hard there. Even in the skies above, it seems.

 

According to a local newspaper report, there wasthe most awful ruckus in a passenger aircraft approaching the city a couple of weeks ago. A male passenger had been touching the buttocks of a passing female flight attendant. In fact it could have been more than one set of buttocks he was digitalizing. The story was not clear on staffing levels but what is not in dispute is that a flight security guard told him to stop it.

 

Some may describe China as a police state but the Chinese are in no special awe of individual policemen- especially one who is a long way above any back up. It strikes me too that any China domestic flight that needs a security guard must be known as a rough route so, all in all, this guard fellow was pushing his luck.

 

He touched a nerve in this passenger even more sensitive than those the man was groping for. Dating from the days of warlordism and Sopwith Camels, men aloft over the Yangtse appear to have had droit de seigneur over passing air hostesses or, in a very literal sense to their minds, ‘flying chicken’. To surrender the ancient privilege of patting and pinching China Eastern rump to an upstart caretaker with a pistol was more than Ningbo manhood could bear.

 

The passenger threw himself upon the security guard and, putting his hands to more furious use, started to strangle him. One never knew they served so much free licquor on Mainland domestic planes.

 

Any body familiar with strangulation knows that it takes quite a while, particularly when its being resisted It’s a wild flailing process, not given to boundaries and particularly flamboyant for the tightly furnished setting of an MD 118 economy class cabin.

 

So adjacent passengers stood and bunched up to make room for the fight . Other passengers moved from all parts of the plane over to the side the action was on. According to the newspaper, the plane tipped and lurched downwardly.

 

Should there be any doubt that this can happen, I have experienced it from the inside on a flight from Lhasa to Chengdu when about twenty Peoples Armed Police from the port side decided to join their twenty colleagues on the starboard side to get a better view of the Himalayas. We lurched, palpably.

 

It was the only point in the flight when the female attendants, who had sat in hypnosis at the rear throughout, demonstrated that they had a nervous system at all. Fearful that we might become one with the Himalayas, they shooed the idiot cops back into their seats.

 

The newspaper report did not tell what happened to the Ningbo plane or its fight crowd. Presumably they did not perish but if they had, how would we have known why? The flight  recorders would have shown a perfectly healthy airplane suddenly tipping downwards. We would have heard only the terrified incredulity of the pilots just before they carved a big hole in outer Ningbo.

 

It would gave been a puzzle that no National Transportation Safety Board could ever have got to the bottom of.

Posted in All, Transport