In response to the two yuletide would-be airline disasters, Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing fame put together this wonderful posting. Systematically, the reactionaries are just ruining the flight-experience, just like the bloated security software they liberally lather on our computers. I guess that this underpants-bomber was not too concerned over maintaining a sensible safety-to-convenience ratio, just as the shoe-bomber and the mystery-liquid and great unknown bombers of Christmas Future were not thinking about the farce that they were about to set off. Apparently now one cannot use the airplane toliet during the last hour of flight before decent starts. Meanwhile, I imagine that the Italian air travel administration will have to fold to the status quo imposed by Ryan Air. Italy was actually moving towards relaxing some of the more non-sensical measures and allowing passengers to board domestic flights with forms of identification like drivers' and hunting licenses. Ryan Air, representing a large portion of the Italian in-country flights, however, does not like this move, since it will create more work for ticketing agents and put kinks in on-line check-ins. I guess it's a good thing that the majority of Ryan Air flights last less than one hour (apparently, that last hour is golden time for mad-bombers) and plan to install pay toliets on their flights.
