5 Secret Rules Everyone Has to Follow on Airplanes

5 No Men Next to Unaccompanied Children

Even though airlines sell you a specific seat number, the flight staff really don’t care whether you sit in the seat that’s marked on your boarding pass. If you find yourself on a flight, separated from your partner or friend because you didn’t pay extra to sit together, ask someone traveling alone if they’re willing to switch seats. They’ll say yes, if your seat is as good as theirs. They might even say yes if your seat is worse, because people really can be considerate sometimes. No flight attendant will stop you. The crew is fine with this.

There are a couple small exceptions to the above tip, however. First, unsurprisingly, you can’t switch seats with a stranger in first class, even if you find someone willing to swap. The second more surprising exception was discovered by Mirko Fischer, a man who flew on a British Airways flight in 2009. Fischer didn’t switch seats with a stranger. He merely switched seats with his wife, who was beside him, because she wanted the window. 

Staff told him he had to switch back. By shifting to the middle seat, he had put himself next to an unaccompanied child, and the airline didn’t allow that. Women were welcome to sit next to such children, but men were not. Fischer felt humiliated at the presumption that he was a child molester (and that all men are child molesters), and he went on to sue British Airways. The airline settled, for the trivial sum of £750 plus legal expenses, which Fischer donated to a child protection charity.

British Airways got rid of the policy after that incident, and it appears that no American airlines have that policy, but some other airlines do — e.g., Qantas and Virgin Australia.

4 No Bulldogs

If you want to bring your dog with you aboard a flight, they might let you stick it in a suitable carrying case and bring it right into the cabin. Otherwise, they might make you stick it in suitable carrying case and then chuck that in with the cargo, where they assure you its environment will be pressurized, temperature-controlled and comfortable. 

But there’s one dog the airline will likely forbid you from sending as cargo. It’s this guy:

The issue isn’t that bulldogs are too large to transport (far from it), nor that they’re that they’re too vicious or can’t stop peeing. The problem is that the bulldog is brachycephalic, which means it doesn’t have much of a snout. Dogs like that have a high risk of suffocating and dying in the cargo container, and after a string of dog deaths in the first decade of this century, many airlines decided to ban such dogs from getting checked in, ever. 

You still might be able to bring your bulldog into the passenger cabin with you. Or, you could book it its own private flight. Or we can work at breeding snouts back into bulldogs, but that might take a while. 

3 No Bees

Other animals are even harder to bring with you. For example, if you attempt to board a flight while wrapped in a blanket of killer bees, officials may object, for some reason. 

This should only ever come up because of the issue of emotional support animals. Airlines will let you bring a service dog with you onto a flight, and they cannot charge you for that. Passengers try to abuse this allowance to bring other animals that haven’t been trained for service. An “emotional support animal” has no firm definition, and you can declare any animal to be one if you want. 

After years of dealing with abled passengers dubiously insisting they need all manner of pets, airlines finally put their foot down. You cannot bring a hedgehog aboard as an emotional support animal, declared American Airlines. You cannot bring ferrets. You cannot bring spiders, and you cannot bring insects of any kind. Those aren’t emotional support animals, if the phrase has any meaning at all. 

2 No Marriage

Up next is one rule that thankfully no longer exists. Until 1968, stewardesses were forbidden from marrying. Airlines hired only single women, and if one did marry after getting hired, they’d fire her. This was written into their contracts, and when women contested their firings, labor boards sided with the airlines. 

Was this rule in place to preserve the illusion that stewardesses were available to cater to a man’s every need? Possibly, but airlines offered two alternate reasons. First, they noted that a married woman could be pregnant, and this could be unsafe for her and others. You can note several problems with that justification (for starters, flying isn’t considered dangerous for pregnancy, at least not till the third trimester). Second, they said that a stewardess traveling a lot may “jeopardize her marriage.” But that really doesn’t seem like the airline’s business.

In 1982, a court ordered United to rehire 1,400 women they’d fired under that rule. It had been at least 14 years since the firing, so we imagine some of them had moved on, but a court said they now had the right to resume their old jobs, if they chose. 

1 No Chitchat

On September 11, 1974, a plane crashed close to Douglas Municipal Airport in Charlotte, killing 72 people aboard. The dead included Stephen Colbert’s father and his two brothers, giving the man the backstory of tragedy and sadness necessary for a career in comedy. 

When the FAA dug into what went wrong, they lay most of the blame at the feet of the crew. When they should have been concentrating at looking at the ground so they could get around to landing, the crew were busy identifying a nearby amusement park and talking about how fun the rides were. They also talked about other stuff, like politics and used cars. “Both crew members expressed strong views and mild aggravation concerning the subjects discussed,” noted the report, reflecting a ”casual mood and lax cockpit atmosphere.” 

The crew hadn’t exactly broken any rule by talking about these topics, as no such rule existed. So, the FAA now made one. It’s called the sterile cockpit rule, and it says that when the plane is below 10,000 feet, crew members must speak of nothing other than flight operations. Any such chitchat can be dangerous, and it seems chitchat about politics takes the danger to a whole new level.

Feel free to apply this rule to your own everyday life as well. When people are fruitlessly arguing over politics, and you just want to get stuff done, scream, “STERILE COCKPIT!” And return to your work. 

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