AFTERTHOUGHT
Roger and out
JOHN WELLS
Passengers on domestic flights inside the United Kingdom may soon be required to produce entry visas and temporary resi- dence permits for all foreign countries in- cluding Albania, as well as full records of inoculation against smallpox, largepox, beri-beri and McIntyre's Whooping Limp. This dramatic proposal is put forward in a new booklet, Information About Your Flight, which will soon be tucked behind the discreet brown-paper bag on all the major airlines. In the section entitled 'On being hijacked—der Hijack—le hijack—el hijack' passengers are shown by means of simple illustrations the correct posture to adopt when they are asked to put their hands behind their heads, or to lie on the floor of the aircraft on landing, before the engines and the local small-arms fire have come to a complete stop. There are also more comprehensive maps covering a wider area, and a multilingual glossary of terms expressing delight, approval, admiration and political support.
The man behind this revolutionary approach to what he calls 'in-flight adjust- ment of schedules by carriers not recog- nised under the Convention for the Unifica- tion of Certain Rules relating to International Carriage by Air, signed at Warsaw on 12 October, 1929, don't you know' is Wing-Commander Benjamin 'Pokey' Worthington, director of studies at the Alcock and Brown College of Advanced Aviation, not far from Virginia Water. Horrified by the mounting spiral of violence in the stratosphere in which airline com- panies have lost millions of pounds in highly sophisticated machinery and rather less sophisticated crews, investors, manage- ment and employees have for some time been demanding tougher action against the jet-age Dick Turpins. In Wing-Commander Worthington they have perhaps found their champion at last. 'Don't guarantee absolute hundred per cent protection, of course,' he told me, 'I think we can probably get them pretty rattled, what?' The Wing- Commander tugged at his moustache, and
led me off on a tour of inspection through the College's classrooms, laboratories and testing sheds.
`Your first problem, of course,' he told me, hammering on the closed shutter of . the club bar, our first port of call, and ‘,,arousing Urk, the barman, 'is your blasted passengers. That's why I've had this book thing done with the little drawings and things. They like them, you know. Gives them something to look at while they're being whizzed to and fro. Not that it would be a blind bit of use in the actual event, any more, say, than all that rubbish they do with the yummiest bird on board wriggling into her rubber whatsits before take-off, but it helps to neutralise them a bit. I've also suggested some kind of a soporific in the pre-pack nosh department and tougher plastic wrappings. Just a time- waster, I know, but it keeps their minds off other things. I'm trying to get them p step up the Muzak and compulsory films, too: anything to hammer them as flat as we can for a kick-off. Of course I've always pressed for a two hour wait on all flights for the same reason, but the pro- motion boys got so shirty I had to climb down. Have another one.'
Two hours later we found ourselves in the self-defence class, where lovely air- hostesses were learning the rudiments of 'unarmed combat. 'Simplest tricks are always the best,' the Wing-Commander ex- plained. 'Take the head-crusher for instance. Come on, girls, show Mr Thingey here what you're made of. You and I are your potential hijackers, you see. We come shuffling into our seats like this, you see. and sit down.' We took our places in a mock-up aircraft, and smiled up at the first air-hostess. 'Now then, by this time Jenny here, I mean Maureen, Roxana that is, has got a pretty shrewd idea what we're up to. So she comes along, bringing with her that grip you see there filled with concrete. heaves it up on to the rack above your head, asks you if it's yours and whether you'd mind putting it under the- seat, and w
you're gibbering away in your woggy tongue she drops it on your nut. Go on, Esmee, show the man how it works. Of course it would be much harder than that in the event. That's just your practice weight.
Now say you're knocked out cold, but I'm still all right. First thought in the soggy mind is to get to the joy-stick. I grab the hostess girlie like this—perhaps he's a bit of a sex-maniac as well, you never know—and what does she do? As you see she snips through my braces, lifts her knee sharply—come on, only practice remember—and pushes this pad of chloro- form over my face, smiling all the time to give the impiession I've had a heart attack. Lovely. What she could also do—and I'm working on this with the engineering wallahs—is to push me into the Iavvy and lock me in with a special catch arrangement on the outside, but we had a couple of mis- haps with that when we tried it out in normal commercial service. All well and good you'll be telling me, but what if the miscreant happens to be a yummie girl? Obviously the sight of a decent hostess struggling with a member of her own sex would be bad for the name of the company, so we get one steward on each aeroplane whose leanings are vaguely oc rather than AC, if you take my drift, to grab her in the pantry area, and while her senses are still in a whirl, hoop-la through the emergency exit.
'Mind you, all that's only the tip of the iceberg. Simulated dancing up the aisle, cs gas down the ventilating nozzles, and the works for anyone who goes near the cock- pit itself, you understand—strangle them with the inflatable lifejackets, plunge your cutlery envelopes in them, circle for hours and prostrate them with nausea—the possi- bilities are endless. The only real problem is spotting your bona fide hijacker as opposed to your average bloody traveller. But my experience is that you can't make an omelette without trampling on a few eggs, and from what I've seen of passengers those that did get themselves duffed over probably wouldn't notice the difference anyway. And now if you'll stay standing exactly where you are at the moment I'll demonstrate what I call the Worthington Bottomless Drop.'
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