Forget banning alcohol on Australian flights – ban reclining seats to ease our mid-air anger | David Penberthy

Picture this – you sit down on a Jetstar flight beside a bloke called Wazza who reclines his seat at the first opportunity. How do you feel about it, writes David Penberthy.

In their edgy and excellent book series Freakonomics, authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner use classical economic theory to analyse a diverse range of human behaviour.

They turn their eye to all sorts of random stuff, from the conduct of drug cartels to the behaviour of real estate agents, even questioning whether it makes economic sense for suicide bombers to take out life insurance (it does, apparently).

One of the most controversial Freakonomics essays examines the link between made-up and misspelt children’s names and the economic and educational outcomes of the child.

The very concept was seen as racist in some quarters but instinct suggests it makes good sense, without questions of race necessarily arising.

If parents name their son Jason but spell Jason with a y and couple of zeds, you could safely hazard a guess that poor little Jayzzon is growing up in an environment where there’s no interest in the importance of spelling, even less interest in books, and where Mum and Dad are statistically more likely to be on welfare or drugs than parents who call their children James and Imogen.

The recent spike in violent incidents on aeroplanes invites the Freakonomics test.

There’s a compelling theory that if you’re flying Jetstar to or from Denpasar and sitting next to a man in a Bintang singlet whose mates call him Wazza, you are statistically more likely to have an unpleasant flight.

Jayzzon has a snooze. Picture: AI generated

Especially if Wazza has had a few quiet ones in the lounge before take-off and is already signalling to the stewardess for a second coldie the moment the seatbelt sign is switched off.

I like drinking. But you have to marvel at the Australian capacity to drink, the ubiquity of booze at every event from kid’s birthday parties to sittings of Parliament, and the fact that with the exception of Good Friday you can get as much grog as you want around the clock.

I drive into work stupidly early each weekday and there’s a pub on the way in that’s usually chockers with patrons at 5am.

I checked this week on the way in and there would have been 20 people inside enjoying the final hour before dawn. It’s like Cheers, for insomniacs.

Whenever and wherever you fly in Australia, it doesn’t matter the time of day, there is always a group of blokes knocking off pints or a few rumbos before heading away.

The 5 o’clock somewhere rule is at its most powerful in the departure lounge, where every hour is cocktail hour.

Clearly prohibition doesn’t work. Nor does taxing things so much that they’re prohibitively expensive, as the failed war on legal tobacco has proved with the explosion in the sale of illegal smokes across Australia.

But I heard one comment on the radio this week from a listener which while unAustralian in nature, to use that dopey term, made a kind of policy sense.

He asked – cue crash of thunder – do we really need to drink alcohol on planes anyway? When you think about it, it’s not much fun drinking on a plane is it?

You are more likely to have to use the aeroplane toilet, which is the worst thing on earth, you’ll feel more dehydrated due to the altitude, the food is invariably rubbish so there’s nothing tasty to enjoy with your wine, and you’ll end up even more lethargic than you would have been anyway at your final destination. You’re also more likely to make an ass of yourself.

The rejoinder to this theory – and it’s a good one – is that banning grog on flights would not address the bigger issue of passengers loading up on “pres” at the lounge before they board the plane.

To refer back to Wazza in his Bintang top, the problem with him isn’t that he had a few on the plane. The problem with Wazza is he’s memorised just one sentence in Bahasa Indonesian, satu bir lagi – one more beer – and used it eight times in a row in Denpasar before take-off.

So to think tangentially in a Freakonomics way, maybe the problem with plane violence doesn’t stem from alcohol. Maybe it stems from seat design.

Instead of banning booze, there is a very strong argument that we should ban the seats from reclining on planes, surely the biggest trigger for an in-flight barney than any other feature of flying.

There is an inverse relationship between the enjoyment derived by the person reclining and the anger felt by the person sitting behind them.

Tourists in Bali. Picture: File

The recliner experiences little in the way of relief when their seat goes back. No one has ever reclined their seat in economy and let out a squeal of joy as their body tilts backwards by just 25mm.

But for the person sitting behind them it’s like their world has come to an end.

Nothing engenders mid-flight rage like the sudden lurch backwards of the chair, especially with the added insult of no polite glance over the shoulder to make sure the rear passenger does not have their table down, or have a bag squished under their feet.

It’s the ultimate in-flight impertinence and without wanting to sound over the top, there is a special place in hell for those who immediate hit recline the moment the plane levels out.

So let the drinks flow and stop the damned chairs from moving.

While you’ll never fully stop the Wazzas of this world from ruining it for the rest of us, this one simple step would make flying statistically more pleasant, especially on that vexed Denpasar route which for some zany reason seems to attract more trouble than any other into Australia.

By the way, I’ve decided for the remaining three weeks I’m not going to write another column about the election campaign. You’ve all suffered enough.