Flying with kids? It’s plane terrible

IT IS possible for a child to be well-behaved during a flight. Kind of. Joe Hildebrand found out how.

The nightmare that is flying with children

FUN fact: historians recently unearthed a previously undiscovered folio of Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions.

Inside is a sketch of what appears to be a Boeing 737, entitled “Medieval Torture Device”. Beneath the drawing is an arrow with the words: “Insert baby here”.

Certainly, I am not the first parent to know the trauma of plane travel with a young child. Indeed, I suspect the disappearance of the Lindbergh baby may have been less a case of national conspiracy and more a case of Lindy taking him on a transatlantic crossing without any Peppa Pig on the iPad.

Such was my experience when, having stayed up all night downloading various puddle-jumping adventures, I discovered after take-off that none of them worked.

By strange coincidence, this occurred at precisely the same moment my wife found out she had packed all our son’s favourite storybooks in the wrong bag.

Astrophysicists talk about how the fabric of time can stretch, a concept that is all but impossible to comprehend.

That is, of course, until one discovers one has just embarked on a flight to Bali with an undistracted toddler. Suddenly, eight hours turns into somewhere between nine and 12 years.

Worse still, we were seated next to an immaculately groomed couple who boarded with a child the same age as ours. Instantly my wife and I knew what we’d walked into. It was a baby-off.

The male of this coupling sported a perfectly trimmed beard and a three-quarter-length cardigan of the kind that is only sold to hipster architects; the female had white jeans and hair that looked like it had just walked off the set of a Garnier commercial.

Their daughter had blonde hair, blue eyes and rosy cheeks, and was, on the balance of probabilities, almost certainly a life-sized doll.

By contrast, our son looked like he’d just dunked his head in a bowl of dog food, which indeed, earlier that morning, he had.

Still, the normal pleasantries were exchanged, along with the obligatory eye-rolling self-deprecating quips about how “We’re all in for it now!”

The other couple even recalled, with strategic precision, a previous horror flight on the London-to-Sydney route, thus at least confirming his architecture business was going quite well.

Meanwhile, the other passengers eyed both our families with the sort of look a white supremacist might normally reserve for a boatload of Jewish-Iraqi asylum seekers. All in all, it was a tough crowd.

As the plane climbed into the sky, the baby-off began. We shoved anything we could into our one’s mouth in an effort to a) stop his ears popping, or b) at least stop him making a sound if they did.

This included dummies, bananas and, in one slightly misjudged attempt, an armrest. Meanwhile, his nemesis remained a picture of angelic calm.

About two hours into the flight, we regained some ground when their daughter lost her top, only to have the advantage reversed when our son lost his pants.

Then, in a miracle rivalled only by the parting of the Red Sea, ours somehow fell asleep while theirs continued to wriggle and squirm. Even the father’s perfect beard could not disguise his mournful smile.

Victory was ours. As we stepped off the plane, I turned to my wife, babe in arms, and said, “Gee, he was good, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, he was,” she agreed. “Why don’t you ever dress like that?”