Posted on 06/17/2024 7:57:57 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Perhaps skip that in-flight negroni.
You’ve had a good year. You and your significant other are about to board that long-haul flight to your well-deserved salmon-fishing vacation in Scotland, where you’ll be pampered just like King Charles in a real Scottish castle — with its own river, no less. Your wellies, your waders, and your fishing kit are on the plane. Next stop, Edinburgh and on to the wild Highlands. In the lounge with time to kill, you two decide to toast embarking on this adventure by ordering up a round of delicious Johnnie Walker Black on ice. Scotland, right? A wee dram, as the Scottish say, puts you in the spirit. Literally.
So, you may not want to hear from these other really smart and interesting people right in the teeth of your getaway moment, but Cologne’s Institute for Aerospace Medicine has some sobering news for you — and they mean that literally: Don’t drink the firewater, baby! Save it for the bar in the castle! You’ve paid so much for the beat on the river that the castle will be comping your drinking anyway!
How to Pair Airline Snacks and In-Flight Cocktails, According to Bar Pros According to a recent study published in the British medical establishment’s terrifyingly-titled scientific journal Thorax, it turns out that drinking alcohol in hypobaric environments lowers your oxygen levels and increases your heart rate simultaneously, even, or especially, when you are subsequently reclining to nap — an inevitability on long-hauls for everybody. In fact, the question is not who drinks and naps on long hauls, but is its reverse: Depending on your trek, faced with six to twenty hours aloft, who doesn’t have a glass of wine and then try to take a nap?
For those of us who are on the far side of the meridian with aches, pains, and ailments as part of our carry-on body baggage, so to speak, drinking while flying does us all worse. The Cologne researchers have proven that pre-flight or inflight alcohol, even as little as a two beers’ worth, triggers that twinned, simultaneous spike-in-heart-rate and drop-in-oxygen-saturation in 100% of their subjects, no matter their age or condition.
Here's Why Your Senses of Smell and Taste Change Radically When You Fly There’s precious little silver lining here. Depending on what and how serious our conditions or ailments are — but especially if they are pulmonary and/or cardial — then the danger of the heart-rate spike alongside the drastic lowering of oxygen levels enables the body to manufacture what medics will dryly describe as a cardiac “event.” In a word, our bodies are opportunistic, like everything else in nature.
If there’s a weak link down in the ticker, and the conditions arise to make it “easy” for someone’s heart to exhibit malfunction based on that vulnerability, it will do that. With the alcohol-induced “conditions” that those couple of pops (or more) have created in your body on a (hypobaric) long-haul, the percentage of likelihood for that event increases.
Depending upon which signature pre-existing health vulnerability you’ve brought aboard, drinking before flying (or inflight) manufactures what we can describe as ideal “storm conditions” out of which the body can call a much larger and more life-threatening acute condition to the forefront.
The Real Reason You Shouldn’t Order Coffee or Tea on an Airplane As our friends in Cologne note, 58% of inflight diversions or emergency landings are the result of heart attacks. That’s grazing the bottom side of two-thirds, an incredibly large percentage. Not that your pre-flight whisky is going to bring that on this time around.
But still: A nascent heart attack is the hurricane theory written inside your body, with alcohol playing the role of the hot, dry westerly trade winds blowing off the Sahara toward the Caribbean. They make it easy for the storms to form.
In a word, dang! It’s gonna be a long, dry flight.
What if you are in international air space?
I thought this might have included an explanation for why some drunks go psycho on flights.
But no. Figures.
I’ve always suspected that there was a biochemical reason for why some people can’t hold their liquor on a plane, but take my word for it:
Don’t fly into Las Vegas with a drunk.
We were headed to a convention and he lipped off to a LV Transit cop after being hauled off the plane when we landed (this was 15 years before tsa). I was just lucky to have not had alcohol on my breath (I didn’t get beaten and go to jail).
It was the last time I went on a business trip with that a-hole (he could hold his liquor on the ground but was one of those we’ve all read about who lost his shit on the plane at altitude, except I saw it first hand).
If you drink plus the lack of enough air then this may happen to you.
Nightmare At 20,000 Feet
https://youtu.be/fXHKDb0CNjA?t=30
Funny.
I put up with a 6 hour flight to and from Arizona several times a year.
To avoid clambering out of the window seat to take a leak, I just avoid drinking anything for several hours before flying. The window seat gives me a small touch of privacy and a view.
Made it every time so far, head straight for the p!sser after getting off the plane. No way i would have a drink, knowing it would trigger my bladder.
I always drank heavily on my flights home from Europe. I was working the oilfield drilling rigs and would go over for 28 days and then 28 days off. My ex=wife would be there whene I returned home. I needed the alcohol. Oddly she did also because I would be there.
Happily divorced now and with my wonderful new lady and wife for 30 years now.
Years ago I would fly from London the Stavanger Norway each 14 days back and forth as I was working on the Drilling Rigs in the North Sea.
As I was a frequent flyer I knew some of the stewardess. The flights were on a DC9, now known as the MD-80. The noise of the turbines were very loud at the back of the aircraft as it had rear mounted engines. Unfortunately the drink cart started from the back of the aircraft forward.
I had a system. I would sit up front and as soon as the seat belt light went off I would go to the back of the aircraft and buy two small bottles of scotch and return to my seat with the Scotch and water. About 30 minutes later the drink and food cart would be there and I would select a cognac with my meal and some wine. Once when I went to the back of the plane the stewardess handing me two little bottles of Scotch. She knew my routine.
Sad that this all history today and no more. Today Airlines are like cattle cars. Albeit I will not critise the airlines as they are reacting to economic reality.
Beer...not hard stuff.
Why would I travel to the land of the ultra woke where they hate Americans and surrendered their country to Islamos and Africans without a fight? Hard pass.
Pan Am
“The flights were on a DC9, now known as the MD-80. The noise of the turbines were very loud at the back of the aircraft as it had rear mounted engines.”
TRUTH!
I want the one on the left
The worst part of getting wasted on a plane is if the weather goes bad and they put on the seat belt sign. I loaded on at the bar before and had 4 shots during and they put up the sign within the first hour and all the way. I tried to get up to go and the steward yelled at me so I had to hold it. Thought for sure I’d pee their seat but managed to make it.
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