"No, you take care of him!"
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.
I didn’t read article, but what are the negative physical symptoms? More heart attacks?
"No, you take care of him!"
You know, I could watch that for *hours*.
“ 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!”
Boy that alone makes me want to go to Scotland. Drinks at the castle bar! Cool!
This is crazy talk.
Of course it’s crazy talk. What if you’re on a Boeing aircraft. Do you want to be sober when that emergency door lets go in midflight? I don’t. What if you’re going down in flames to certain death? You want to be fully conscious and awake experiencing that to the last nano-second? Not me. What if your plane or your pilot wants to do a “Dutch roll” (see a previous article in todays forum), do you want to be scared to death and have a heart attack because you are stone cold sober OR do you want to be the one to stand up and say “That was fun! let’s do it again” and be the hero that calms everybody down?
Who drinks negronis on planes anyway?
Same
The article is true. I had a wine spritzer before going to sleep on a flight to Australia. I didn’t even get to sleep before turning blue and dying.
Then I died another agonizing death during the “winter of death” for the unvaccinated.
I better listen to the science or I will die yet again.
You should too.
When we flew commercial for the military the saying was “Never fly sober”. Never had a medical incident with any of us using that philosophy.
But the catering on MAC flights made that mindset difficult to achieve.
I flew on a overnight flight from Kona to Los Angeles. Left Kona at 9 PM and arrived in LA at 5 AM. My buddy and I knocked back 3 or 4 beers before getting on the plane. Slept the whole flight.
I was gonna say, what if they’re on a Boeing 737-Max......
uhh...
What movie is that?
[What if your plane or your pilot wants to do a “Dutch roll”]
I just heard about that 2-3 nights ago.
I would only drink a negroni on a point or a line.
probably one of the biggest contributing factors is the fact that U.S. air flights are pressurized to only 8,000 feet, so everyone is breathing MUCH less oxygen than normal ... those from coastal areas are going to be affected the most ... rocky mountain state residents not affected as much because we have more red blood cells built up from living in a lower oxygen environment ...
If it’s the pilots choice and not a faulty plane design/malfunction, I think it should be put to a vote of the passengers whether he does one. A simple voice count of “aye” or “nay” will suffice. Majority rule of course.
No idea. I searched for “drunk guy on plane” and found that most appropriate clip.
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