Nightmares at 30,000 feet

IN Dante's "Inferno," hell is divided into nine concentric circles where unrepentant sinners are punished in lurid ways, like immersion in boiling blood or eternal exposure to rain and hail.

The Italian poet lived in the 14th century, long before the advent of commercial aviation, so it is not his fault that he failed to mention a 10th circle, where the damned are subjected to hellish trips on airplanes.

You board when your row is called and buckle your seat belt, exactly as told. But then a man with body odor you could smell across the waiting room sits next to you, a colicky baby starts spitting up beside you or a flight attendant announces that, unfortunately, all the toilets except one are out of order on a six-hour flight.

That's when you start wracking your brain to remember how you've sinned, because you're about to be punished, aloft in a 747.

Such discomfort used to be visited upon travelers about once in every dozen trips. But now that heightened security has made airports inhospitable and financially strapped airline companies have cut services to the bone, nightmare trips seem more common.

I've taken to collecting flight horror stories because, in some twisted way, they make me feel better when I remember my own.

Sharon Wingler, a veteran flight attendant for Delta and publisher of the Travel Alone and Love It website (travelaloneandloveit.com), told me she once had to referee an argument between a man and a woman fighting for control of the armrest.

Rob Sangster, the author of "Traveler's Tool Kit," was on a flight from the United Arab Emirates to Trivandrum, India, packed with Indians returning home from jobs in the Middle East.

Their purchases filled the aisles and overhead bins but couldn't be unloaded when the plane landed because of a surprise baggage-handler's strike that also kept the passengers stuck on board in 110-degree heat.

"After an hour," Sangster wrote me by e-mail, "relatives waiting in the terminal, in frenzied impatience to see the goodies, overpowered the strikers and stormed the plane with ladders. They formed a human conveyor belt to move the boxes into the terminal, cheering as they ripped them open."

Michaela Klink Caughlan, an executive with Oakland-based Lonely Planet, related the story of a flight from hell inflicted on her husband, Mike.

On a long-haul flight from the U.S. to Amsterdam, he ended up next to a foul-smelling, tattooed man who gnawed on his own hands and put butter in his coffee. Throughout the 12-hour ordeal Mike was too afraid to sleep.

My own horror stories can match theirs. I once had to push my way to the front of a seething crowd and pitch a fit to avoid getting bumped on a flight from Amman, Jordan, to New York.

With a fever and heaving stomach, I boarded a Balkan Bulgarian flight from Istanbul to Sofia, Bulgaria, about 10 years ago. After the plane took off, everyone lighted up, filling the cabin with smoke and the nauseating odor of cigarettes.

Another time, on a packed plane from Helsinki to New York, I found myself in the midst of a big tour group of Finns who saw the long-haul flight as an opportunity for a party. The vodka never stopped flowing, and the sound of their merriment was deafening.

But the worst was last summer on a United flight from Washington, D.C., to Paris, an overnight trip lasting about nine hours. I have used the carrier often enough to earn frequent-flier Premier status, which allows me to reserve a somewhat roomier-than-average seat at the front of the coach section.

On this flight, I got a seat in the bulkhead row, at the end of the center bank of five seats, next to a pleasant older man. Next to him were two polite French teenagers, separated from their parents who were in the row behind. The seat on the far aisle was empty, and the bathrooms were close by. Perfect, I thought. I relaxed and got ready for take-off.

Then a flight attendant appeared, asking if anyone in my row would move to the rear to give the bulkhead to two mothers with babies. This presented a moral dilemma: Should I stay in a place I'd taken special care to reserve or move to an awful center seat in back? Selfishly, I said I wanted to stay where I was, which is probably why I was punished.

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Toddler gone wild