Somewhere over the Channel, the eighth baby joined in.One baby is bad luck but there were eight of them, distributed through the rows around my seat by what I can only assume is the same algorithm that seats you between two armrest enthusiasts. They didn't even have the decency to cry simultaneously, which might have resulted in them cancelling each out. They worked in shifts. One would wind down, and hand the siren to the next like a relay team defending a world record.
I sat in the middle of it with earplugs in, breathing slowly and staring at the seatbelt sign as though it might be persuaded, and when we landed I filed my report to the family group chat where I informed them that I had spent four hours in the middle of a Durex advert.
But the line I actually want to talk about is the other one, the one I still stand behind now the adrenaline has been fully metabolised: "I have sympathies for the babies, I just think it would be reasonable to limit the number in a seating area by the flight planners."
The babies were the only honest passengers on board
Firstly I want to be clear, I am very sympathetic to babies in general, and especially on airplanes. A baby on a plane is having a considerably worse flight than you are. Their ears hurt, the pressure changes are not explicable to them, they are strapped to an adult inside a loud vibrating tube for reasons nobody has successfully outlined, and they have precisely one output device, which they are entitled to use. I’ve seen adults do the same in that situation, so it’s not wholly unreasonable.
However, a baby's cry is also one of the most effective alarms ever shipped by design (thanks evolution). A group in Geneva led by Luc Arnal, looking at why screams and sirens cut through when ordinary speech does not, landed on acoustic roughness, a fast flutter in the amplitude of a sound, as the property that recruits attention fastest: exactly where crying sits. The finding is about screams generally rather than infants specifically and the field has not finished arguing about it, but the direction of travel is clear enough: this is a sound built to be unignorable, refined over a great many generations, because a baby you could comfortably ignore didn't make it out of prehistory.
Crying babies are filtered out, not ignored
The first bit of sensible advice is that you get used to it. Everyone else on that flight did, more or less. A brain registers the alarm, runs a quick check, concludes not mine and nothing I can do, and downgrades it. The sound stays annoying but gets filed as background. That downgrade is a real physical process, and it is the thing that is not happening in my head. The literature on sensory habituation in autistic people is messy and the samples are small, but the shape of the finding, in work from Shulamite Green's group at UCLA among others, is that the usual drop-off in response across repeated exposure to a mildly unpleasant sound is reduced or missing. So the fortieth scream arrives at the same priority as the first, and the ADHD half of the operation abandons whatever I was using to cope and sprints towards each new one. An alarm engineered to defeat filtering, on loop, played to a filter that was not fitted.
The second bit of sensible advice is noise cancelling, and this one is worse, because it actively makes the problem harder (or leaves you exposed if the noise does get through). Active noise cancellation works by predicting a waveform and playing its opposite, which it does beautifully on the engine drone, a periodic sound of exactly the kind it was built for. It does very little for a cry, which is sharp, aperiodic and sitting up where you are relying on passive attenuation anyway. I have written about this before with reference to my cat, who defeats the same technology nightly. But on a plane there is an additional insult: that engine drone was masking the babies. Cancel the drone and you have not removed the cry, you have removed the only thing that was covering it.
Every sensory fix is either the input or the exit
Step back and it becomes clear that every coping strategy I own falls into one of two categories. Either I change what is arriving, or I change where I am. Curtains, earplugs, a hood, a quieter room: those are input or input negation. Standing up, stepping outside, going home, going to bed: those are exit.
Most of the time you can improvise between the two. If you cannot fix the input you leave, and if you cannot leave you fix the input. It is a genuinely robust little system with two independent legs, right up until you board an aircraft, which takes one leg away and then charges you extra for the seat.
Consider what a plane actually is, sensorily. Constant drone occupying the exact channel you would otherwise use to absorb noise. Recycled air dry enough to make your own skin feel borrowed. Lighting that alternates between interrogation and abrupt dusk. Strangers pressed into both edges of your vision. Any one of those, on the ground, I can engineer around but a cabin is a room you are not allowed to modify, containing every stressor at once, for a duration set by somebody else, with the exit removed by law.
And then ask the obvious follow-up question: how has sound been engineered for comfort in a cabin? It hasn’t, it’s not on the priority list at all. Airlines plan weight to the kilogram, fuel to the minute and meals to the trolley-inch. Where the babies sit is an emergent property of booking systems, bassinet fittings and pram logistics. A handful of carriers have experimented with child-free zones, which at least establishes that a solution can be considered, but for the rest of us it is left to chance.
Avoiding cabin sensory discomfort in future
One takeaway, before I start the list, is that it is much easier to cope with an environment than it is to be hard on yourself. Feeling broken or like you are the problem means you are still exposed to the source of the issue, without tools to cope. Approaching discomforts such as babies crying not only makes the problem easier to address, but it is more sympathetic to the others in the same situation (notably the babies themselves). The reason I’m writing this article is because I hadn’t taken that to heart at the time, but now I’ve grown enough to learn how to approach the problem through planning and adaptation:
- Book against the bassinets. Bassinet fittings live on bulkhead rows, seat maps show you exactly where the bulkheads are, and the information has been sitting there in plain sight the entire time. Avoid bulkhead or bassinet compatible seats - a quick search or AI lookup of your plane type can suggest an optimal seat booking.
- Turn the alarm back into a sound rather than chasing silence. You won’t get the sound to zero, so you should aim for a level your brain can file or filter without distress.
- Keep some of the drone. This one is counterintuitive and I resisted it for a year. Broadband engine noise is masking, and masking is doing you a favour. Seating near the wings is surprisingly good at blocking out unwanted sounds in the cabin.
- Block the sides as well as the ears. Cabins strobe: window glare, then dusk, then a reading light installed permanently in your peripheral vision, then a trolley, then the toilet queue moving past your shoulder every ninety seconds. Peripheral movement is its own tax, and it is exactly the tax our Focus Frames side shields were designed to cancel.
- Board with capacity, not at capacity. I exercise on the morning of a flight and eat something safe and boring before I get to the airport, because boarding at eighty per cent used is precisely how something small can tip me over the edge. “Hangry” in the air is often impossible to remedy which will compound any other discomfort.
It would be better if the airlines considered babies, families and other passengers but we know they won’t for now at least, so for now, I hope you found this useful, and happy flying!
