I imagined flying on Christmas day to be a fairly quiet flight based on previous experiences. I recall a Garuda flight on Christmas day from Bali to Perth to be almost empty except for half a dozen people on board, this was a decade ago. This was a midday flight and I guess everyone was busy having Christmas lunch in their Balinese resort.
After a long lunch at a resort, I was taking a later flight, this was a 18:20 flight and I was expecting similar circumstances. In the boarding lounge much to my surprise, there were more people than I expected, but still, this wasn't looking like a full flight and I was pretty happy.
I was feeling pretty relaxed during boarding, then the chaos started. A whole bunch of people with unruly children arrived late, I was already seated, still feeling good at this stage and thought they were ready to close the door.
That's when the horrible screaming, crying and poorly disciplined children and the mayhem erupted. I quickly reached for my tablet and headphones and cranked the volume up in an attempt to drown out the noise - this was to no avail.
The whole duration of the flight had screaming children running up and down the aisles, children climbing over everything, kicking seats, pushing the flight attendant button, yelling, turning the overhead reading lights on and off, constant crying and of course the all too frequent scream. This group of parents just let these kids run riot for the whole flight, this was a flight that had descended into chaos.
I'm not a parent so maybe I'm a little intolerant to parent's issues but I also know bad parenting too. We had certain standards of behaviour as kids growing up in the 70s, we knew what we were allowed to do and what we weren't and we knew the consequences of not behaving. Christmas day is for the kids and today they certainly did as they wished.
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