Flight attendants forget passengers on board

There was once an airline in Germany that gave every passenger a chocolate heart after they landed. It was a nice gesture that aroused anticipation among many people from the moment it was announced that the landing approach was about to begin. On the candy wrapped in red aluminum foil that you would soon hold in your hands and pop into your mouth on the passenger bridge after leaving the plane. However, in view of news from the USA, this former attention appears in a slightly different light. Perhaps this airline wasn’t so much about warmth as it was about cool pragmatism. Because if you get chocolate as a gift when you get off a plane, you’ll almost certainly actually get off – a bribe with a little milk chocolate.

Now you might ask yourself who will voluntarily stay on a plane when they can finally stretch their legs again, possibly even in the sun. But there seem to be these cases of stubborn people sitting and lying down. Otherwise, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, the union for American Airlines flight attendants, would not have publicly warned its members to be more careful. In the USA people are generally quicker to give advice on how to do this and what not to do, rather than relying on people’s life experiences. Which is why you can’t buy a blender or washing machine without the instructions warning you not to put pets in them. However, one must assume that a specific reason is usually required before what is already clear to everyone except the person who caused the reason is recorded in writing.

In any case, the flight attendants are being asked by their union to check more thoroughly in the future whether there are still passengers on board before they leave the plane themselves. Cases of sleeping travelers left behind on planes appear to have increased in the USA. Fellow travelers can be forgiven for not waking up the person sitting next to them who is wearing a MAGA cap, because then they might just have to let him shout at them that it’s okay fake newsthat he was asleep. But is it too much to ask airline employees to gently nudge you if you miss your landing? Noticing one even when you’re curled up deep in your seat and don’t notice loud snoring noises? The question also arises as to what do cleaning crews see as their task when they even leave people weighing two or three hundredweight lying in the rows of seats?

Now you can console yourself with the fact that if the worst comes to the worst, you might be able to take off again and end up unexpectedly in New York or Hawaii. However, that is just as much an illusion as ever receiving a chocolate heart as a gift again. You will almost certainly be discovered after a cool night on an outpost of the tarmac. And if, against all odds, you are still on board the connecting flight, the plane is guaranteed to fly back to where you came from. Or to Iowa.