There’s Just Something About The Air Up There

I really would have expected to find this AP story under the weird news instead of MSNBC.com’s front page. I guess that means it’s really important news, huh? An American Airlines flight had to make an unexpected diversion and landing the other day after passengers reported smelling a burning scent. It turns out the scent was from recently lit matches (yes, lit matches on a plane). The offending female passenger on the flight had lit matches, but it was not for fun or as a prank. Sadly, (in a way) she felt she had to light them in order to cover up her passing of well, you guessed it, gas. In a story ‘ripped’ from the headlines, the Associated Press said the woman had an ‘unspecified medical condition,’ but did not say what she had eaten prior to boarding the flight. Although one can imagine a few of the items she may have eaten to cause this problem.

Man, that has to be embarrassing when your ‘scent’ is so overpowering that you need to risk the wrath of an air marshal by lighting matches to hide it. I bet next time she travels by air, when and if they let her, she includes a bag of potpourri in addition to the matches. Not knowing who this woman was, you can just imagine the few moments of sheer terror she felt when she realized that her ‘release’ of built up ‘pressure’ (I’m trying to use politically correct terms here) was ‘detectable.’ Ok, I guess I didn’t need to put quotes around detectable, but it seemed ‘appropriate,’ ‘sorry.’

It really surprises me that there is not some type of gas or bodily odor masking device already installed on commercial airliners. These pressured bullets with wings fly around at 40,000 feet so it’s not like you can open a window to allow the offending odor out. It’s also not a real good idea to spray Lysol or some other deodorizer, as its scent will linger too. If I was smarter and had the ability to hammer something together without the perquisite 3 emergency room trips per nail, I would invent and pattern an airline odor-fighting device. I would call it the F.L.I.G.H.T. (for lingering internal gas hovering temporarily) Fighter. The F.L.I.G.H.T. Fighter would be installed, at a nominal charge of course, aboard every airline willing to purchase one and it would be able to filter only air that had been contaminated by human gas. I have no idea how this could be achieved from a scientific point of view, but as a person who is most definitely not a scientist, I’m not worried about that. I can also see sales potential for the F.L.I.G.H.T. Fighter in the elevator, public transit and office cubicle industries. Oh yeah, portable toilet manufacturers might find it to be an attractive addition to their products too. Seriously, the world could definitely use odor free porta-potties. Maybe these devices could be reconfigured to fight tobacco smell and the smell of old age so that all the world would be either non-scented or pleasant food-scented. Maybe then, we’d all get along.

No one should have to feel remorse or embarrassment about having normal bodily ‘escapeage.’ Although in reality, I haven’t met a man yet who actually does feel remorse about it but that’s not my point. Unfortunately, it’s a natural process that smells really, really bad. If we can find a way to eliminate the body’s negative after affects, there would be no more awkward moments, snickering or finger pointing about ‘who dealt it.’ I was tempted to criticize American Airlines or whoever made what happened on the flight public (after I made fun of it of course), but maybe what they really did was bring to the forefront America’s misunderstood problem of bodily gas. We now live in a time when we have the technology to clone living things, use GPS to find out where we are at any spot on Earth and make an American Idol microphone that allows you to sing along to any song on the radio (according to the ad I saw). Don’t you think it’s about time we are able to make in-flight or personal handheld gas-hiding devices? After all, as we learned yesterday, when you’ve got enough gas to get to Pittsburgh (to quote Dean Martin), matches aren’t the answer.