Mobile birth control…Or why I hate to fly Southwest

Now don’t get me wrong, Southwest definitely has some things going for it. It’s inexpensive, they’re on time, and their flight crews are some of the friendliest and funniest in the industry. What I hate about Southwest is the fact that they’ve turned into the Greyhound of the skies. Almost anyone can get a Southwest ticket, and that includes families with little children.

(Now before I get too far into my rant I’ll be honest, when I finally have a family I’ll probably end up taking Southwest and render myself a complete hypocrite in the process.)

A fun little game that we’ve come up with is trying to figure out which kid will be the biggest pain in the ass on the flight. Originally my strategy was to find the loudest most misbehaved kids in the terminal and pick them as my horse. It turns out that it’s a little more complicated than that. Now my strategy is to identify all the kids boarding my flight. Once I have them marked observe if they’re already misbehaving or if they’re sleeping. It’s the sleepers that I’ve learned to watch out for, if only for the fact that they’ll have a ton of energy and be fidgety for the entire flight. Next, figure out how weary their parents are. Full of energy? Great, they’ll put up a fight and hopefully keep their kid under wraps. Tired with a look of defeat in their eyes? Well, that kind of explains itself doesn’t it? The selection process is definitely a work in progress, but it’s definitely better.

As I’m writing this I’m trying to figure out if there’s some way I can turn this into a gambling pool. How would you measure who won? Is it a most passengers annoyed kind of thing? Or do you go with decibels? Perhaps it could be pure duration for a tantrum. Elias would have a field day with this. Little Johnny Smith has a annoyance percentage of 52% in Boeing 737 during coast-to-coast flights this season when sitting next to his father in a window seat. Can you imagine if ESPN covered something like this? Sue Wiggins put on a Herculean show of endurance today, outlasting the Juarez child with a tantrum of one hour and 30 minutes, managing to connect on 35 of 40 passengers within earshot.

Seriously, this could work. You set up the pool at the gate before everyone boards, odds makers would scout the kids out prior to and everyone would make their picks as they handed in their boarding passes. You’d have parents refusing to tend to their kids just to squeeze out a few extra seconds. They’d start bringing multiple kids on board just for the assists. You'd have travelers checking out the departure boards like they were at an OTB. If the airline ran it their cut would provide an additional revenue stream. Seriously, this has to happen. I might even consider flying Southwest again if it did.