My sister and I recently had to book a last-minute flight to Australia—she happened to be staying with me in London when we received news of a family emergency. For various reasons, the trip we took was a roundabout one: from London to Vancouver to Brisbane to Cairns. Although time was of the essence in getting back to Australia, the trip did not run smoothly, particularly our flight from Vancouver to Brisbane, which ended up being delayed by nine hours.
We found this out at about 1.30am, after our flight had already been delayed for several hours.1 As we were waiting in line to board the aircraft, we were told that the flight would now depart at 8.15am, but that leaving the airport would be well-nigh impossible, because we were already through security, had checked our bags, etc. No accommodation would be provided and we would have to fend for ourselves at the airport.
As you can imagine, this news was not well received and there were immediate rumblings of discontent amongst the tired, disgruntled passengers. Where would we sleep? Could they reopen the airport lounge for the use of all the passengers? What assurance did we have that the flight would actually leave at 8.15am, given the endless delays we had already experienced?
Keenly aware that they were about to have a riot on their hands, the airline staff relented enough to make some minor accommodations. These included a food voucher (virtually useless, since the airport was a ghost town and the food court was due to reopen shortly before our newly scheduled departure time), a flight blanket to use with the size and texture of a fake pashmina (i.e., thin, worn and too small to be functional), and a pamphlet about how to claim compensation.2 A staff member also made a run to a local 24-hr pharmacy to pick up disposable diapers for those with infants, although I think the supply ended up being raided by passengers in search of substitute pillows.
What was most notable about this incident was clearly not the airline’s disregard for consumers (that’s kind of their thing), but its effect on passengers. Suddenly, people who had been jostling in line moments before and grimly eyeing each other’s cabin baggage, were no longer merely suffering each other’s presence. United in our righteous indignation, we were All In This Together.
In some respects, this is not terribly different from the general response to transit delays, where the social walls between commuters break down long enough for everyone to exchange groans and eye rolls, before everyone goes back to studiously pretending that other passengers don’t exist. As I have previously discussed, Kate Fox calls this the ‘moan-exception’ to the deny-other-people-exist-on-transit rule. In her words, ‘Such problems seem to have an instant bonding effect on English passengers, clearly based on the “them and us” principle’.
That said, the phenomenon is hardly unique to the English. It can be witnessed on transit the world over, as strangers bond fleetingly over delayed buses, cancelled trains and missed flight connections. As the social psychologist Robin Kowalski observes, under certain social conditions, complaining can serve as a ‘social lubricant’. A key feature of such complaints is that, to quote the conversational analyst Harvey Sacks, ‘all members but the person or object being complained of, are members of an alternative category’. This is why he describes them as ‘safe complaints’: because they invoke a put upon ‘us’ and a problem-causing ‘them’, they invite affirmation.
Still, I think there is something distinctive about the response to the delayed flight, which went well beyond a few shared commiserations to a general feeling of community and solidarity. One woman passed around her pack of gummy bears. Unprompted, people shared the best spots to sleep.3 I loaned my pillow to a fellow passenger to use when I wasn’t sleeping on the floor with it myself. People wandered off to the loos when nature called, without any of the usual concern about their bag. We notified each other of gate changes as the departure time finally neared.
But what made these expressions of social solidarity even more notable was that they occurred in a context of stark inequality. After all, unless you’re travelling on a budget airline, inequality is baked into the entire experience—from the boarding sequence to the relative luxury of business class, which ‘cattle class’ have to resentfully make their way through as they head to the back of the plane.4
Notably, cabin classes were not initially a part of air travel. This was primarily because it was so expensive that only the extremely wealthy could afford it. Consequently, planes were often unimaginably luxurious, featuring dining galleys, bars, executive chefs, dressing rooms, and toilets so spacious that the men’s room featured its own urinal!
According to Key.Areo, it was only after the relative cost of air travel reduced, and trade association restrictions loosened, that cabin classes were introduced, starting in the 1950s. First class and economy were followed by business class and, later, premium economy. More cost effective than first class, the latter two ‘elite’ classes have increasingly replaced it. As the linguistic anthropologist Crispin Thurlow illustrates, premium economy requires a delicate balancing act on the part of airlines: they must convince passengers that it’s superior to standard economy, whilst not making it so attractive that the lucrative business class fares dry up.
Thurlow argues that airline classes encourage passengers to delight in such distinctions, and the inequality they implicitly entail. Certainly, having ‘status’ means that you’re being treated better than other passengers (although the nature of status is that other passengers are almost assuredly being treated better than you). Based on the instances I’ve experienced it, part of the pleasure of traveling in premium economy is knowing that you’re not stuck in cattle class. It’s not that it’s comfortable per se, but that it’s more comfortable than economy.
Yet, once our flight was delayed, these priorly significant distinctions meant less than nothing. Whether passengers had purchased a flatbed on the flight or an economy seat, their bed of choice at the airport was either a bank of uncomfortable chairs or the floor. Thus, it wasn’t just the shared sense of being put-upon that caused the feeling of solidarity, but the fact that it had flattened the differences between us, none of which seemed relevant at 3am in a deserted airport. For instance, I learned little about the older Australian woman I took turns sharing my pillow with (including her name), except that she lived in Quebec.
In his book The Ritual Process, the anthropologist Victor Turner actually coined a term for this phenomenon: communitas. Fleeting by nature, it occurs when social structures temporarily dissolve. In Turner’s words, ‘Secular distinctions of rank and status disappear or are homogenized’ and the result is a ‘generalized social bond… that has yet to be fragmented into a multiplicity of structural ties’.
Communitas is formally engineered during during puberty rites, when novices are systematically stripped of their prior social status but have not yet been initiated into adulthood; however, it also arises spontaneously in a variety of contexts. The movie The Breakfast Club is basically an extended illustration of communitas, as five students with very different positions in the rigid social hierarchies that characterise American high schools5 bond over the course of a day in detention.
But as The Breakfast Club illustrates, the spontaneity and immediacy of communitas can’t be sustained for long. You know at the end of the film that the characters are never going to speak again. Likewise, the sense of solidarity amongst passengers lasted only until we—at last!—got on the plane. Communitas simply could not survive the structure of a flight designed to convey status distinctions in every aspect of its architecture, from the layout of cabin classes to the design of the seats themselves.
Still, a remnant of goodwill lingered insofar as it seemed to my sister and I that we were all a little nicer to each other on the flight itself than would typically be the case. So I guess my main takeaway (well, aside from the blanket they provided6) is that while flying has a tendency to destroy one’s faith in humanity, on some very rare occasions, it serves to affirm it too.
Naturally, these were divided into fifteen-minute blocks. For some reason, airlines seem to believe that telling people every fifteen minutes that their flight will be ready to board in fifteen minutes time is less annoying than telling them it will be delayed for two hours. This, of course, is a fallacy, because instead of the immediate outcry, you merely stoke a slow burning resentment that tends to ultimately erupt in much the same way.
A ruse, I assume, to temporarily placate passengers, given that the airline subsequently refused point blank to provide it.
Making them rather different from, say, cruise liners, where there are also different passenger classes, but you are not forced to parade through luxury berths filled with people knocking back glasses of champagne, before making your way to your own.
Well, at least depictions of such in Hollywood films.
Fake pashmina or no, after the shabby way we were treated, I certainly wasn’t giving it back!
Certainly the slightest deviation from the “norm” in such group situations seems to break down the usual isolationist tendencies in transit, whether bus, streetcar, subway, rail or airplane.
People look up from their books or devices if, for example, the lights flicker or dim, if the vehicle seems to be turning in an unaccustomed direction when no announcement has been heard, unintelligible understood any of announcements which lead people to ask others whether THEY’VE
understood any part of what was said. Even what might seems an unaccountably long wait for a bus breaks the usual “don’t talk to strangers” “rule”.
All such situations create a moment of Communitas.
In Montreal, where I grew up, language was an added impediment ,as one could not be certain which language to use if “forced “ to greet or ask a question of a stranger.