Saudis on a Plane

Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. And you wonder why people look at you funny. It is stuff like this [well, amongst a plethora of other "stuff"] that gives the world cause to ridicule. Completely senseless.

All I can say is that I have never had the dubious pleasure of flying Saudia and mostly likely never will. Cannot imagine that I would book a flight with them to go anywhere...

"Muhammad, is there a woman sitting beside you?" Thought for sure I was going to have to applaud some woman for becoming Saudi's second pilot [one of the Prince's has a "Captain" on his staff that is Saudi Arabia's first woman pilot; I think she's a flight engineer though and not really a Captain even though she calls herself a Captain]. But noooo. Of course not. It was a question "asked by the Saudia flight attendant when he saw a woman entering the airplane." The man, Abdullah Al-Maghlouth, who wrote the article says that "In 15 minutes, I changed my seat four times when the number of women entering the airplane kept increasing." Apparently the Saudia flight attendants do not know how to handle seeing "a woman sitting next to a man they think is a stranger." Imagine if there were ever a REAL emergency how they'd react. I shudder at the mere thought.

The Saudia flight attendants "immediately volunteer to find another seat for the woman even if she has not complained. At one point they separated a man from his wife and placed a strange woman next to him." Tell me this is not a LFZ... "The greater the number of women in the plane, the bigger the mess." Which is exactly why women should not be allowed to travel without a mahram [male, relative, companion]. As long as she has her handler with her there is no problem, right? Problem solved. [Yes. Of course I mean that sarcastically!]

"On one of my trips... I could not help laughing at the comedy that unfolded inside the aircraft. An Indian engineer sitting next to me described it as a funny movie." I bet he did. A funny movie - old movie - as in black and white. Apparently the "comedy" did not end there. One of the male passengers "kept asking a female flight attendant [they are not Saudis, these female flight attendants] a question every time she passed him." Finally a male flight attendant addressed one of the man's many questions and told him that "she had jumped out of the plane in order to escape his questions." [Read: Thinly veiled advances. No pun intended.] When one male passenger asked the female passenger sitting next to him if he could read her newspaper and when she finally gave it to him, he wrote his phone number on it for her. Yeah. That would do it for most women. You simply write your phone number down and women will all race to the nearest phone booth to call you immediately enter it in their mobiles and put you on speed dial. Not.

Mr. Al-Maghlouth says, "I am sure the kind of scenes I described happen only aboard our flights. It has become a studio for comic movies that has not yet been discovered and invested in despite the fact that these scenes make us laugh but at the same time show how ignorant our people are. Changing seats, chaos and harassing women on a bus are not the characteristics of a civilized society. Then what about on an airplane?" BAM! He nails it!!! [Emphasis, mine.]