Which side?

While leading workers in sixteen former Soviet Union satellite countries in the mid-90s, I was based in Wiesbaden, Germany, and I flew out of Frankfurt’s international airport. People often asked me how many frequent flier reward trips I earned from frequent traveling to all those countries. My response: zero.

Frequent programs were either fairly new or nonexistent. Lufthansa, the German national airline, did not even start a frequent flier program until 1993, and the eastern European airlines had no such programs in the aftermath of the fall of communism. Plus, I flew on the least expensive airlines to the capitols of those countries, and that was always their own national carriers which all flew in and out of Frankfurt. If I was going to Poland, I flew LOT. Going to Romania, then it was TAROM. CSA for Czech Republic, and so on.

After traveling in 130 countries over the past 46 years, I have accumulated a lot of flying stories. This post will share only two.

We built an air strip behind our house in the bush in eastern Burkina Faso. The only thing that made it an air strip was that we had graded a kilometer long area out of the shrub brush embedded in the volcanic graveled soil, and the national government had required us to place a white-washed cement borne every 100 meters.

A kilometer was an overkill runway for the small Cessna 180 tail dragger, but that is what it took to get the air strip registered in the country.

We did not have any communication with the outside world, so we would not know exactly when the plane was coming once a week to bring volunteers or supplies, so the pilot would buzz the air strip for two reasons: to let us know that he was about to land and to clear all the animals off the runway.

The edges of the air strip were some of the most grazed areas anywhere around us because our boys had the only real soccer ball in any of the surrounding villages, and the shepherd boys would let their sheep and goats graze while they played soccer.

Since you were probably expecting a story about a commercial flight, here you go. I was flying from Belgrade, Serbia to Frankfurt on Yugoslavia Airlines. The plane was a twin engine prop of unknow origin and had about 18 rows of seats with two seats on each side. We were still using paper tickets at the time, and I looked at my paper boarding pass to make sure that I had requested a nonsmoking seat.  I was in an aisle seat and the guy on the other side of the aisle lit up a cigarette.

After confirming that I had a nonsmoking seat, I waved at the flight attendant, who reluctantly made her way to me. I showed her my boarding pass to indicate that I had chosen a non smoking seat. She said, “Yes.” I was waiting for more words to come from her mouth, but she just stood there looking at me. Then, I pointed at the man across the aisle from me who was smoking and said, “But, he is smoking.” She said, “Yes.”

Frustrated, I told her that I wanted to be in a non smoking zone on the plane, and she said, “Yes, you are.” OK, I got two more words from her that time, so once again, I said, “He is smoking and sitting next to me.” Then it was like a light bulb was turned on. She said, “Ohhh. This side smoking and your side no smoking.” That made me feel so much better knowing that there was a logical explanation for why someone sitting 18 inches from me could smoke while I was in the non smoking section—the left side of the plane!