I'd be just as happy to have been part of the Jetsam 26

Flying has become a truly stressful and terrible experience. Even when you pay for early boarding, aisle seat, extra legroom - which I invariably do - every flight I've been on in the past few years has been something of a hassle. 

You get to the airport early, happy that you paid for breeze-through TSA Pre and don't have to take your shoes off, only to find out that there's no TSA Pre. (What up with that, Aer Lingus at Logan?)

Then there are the entreaties at the gate, on perpetual loop, asking passengers in the later boarding tranches to voluntarily offer up their bags for gate check since there'll be no room in the overhead bins for their super-sized roll-on. 

Every flight I've been on of late has a lengthy standby list, so that things are pretty much cheek to jowl once you're jammed on.

The terminals are also jammed and I'm amazed I haven't as yet seen a traveler mowed down and over by one of the geezer passenger carts careening pell-mell through the terminal. 

Then there are the delays, delays, delays.

I flew from JFK to Boston a few weeks back and, thanks to some sort of circuit meltdown in air traffic control in the DC area, Dulles, Reagan, and BWI were all shutdown. This set off the domino effect, and there were all kinds of delays and cancellations up and down the East Coast. My flight was delayed by 4 hours. I should have been home by 9 p.m. or so, but rolled in at 1 a.m.

And don't get me going on the norovirus I'm pretty sure I picked up from a Wolfgang Puck salad consumed during a layover at O'Hare in early May.

Maybe airline travel has always been a miserable experience. Maybe it's just less tolerable to me in old age. Maybe it truly has gotten worse. 

And a proof point here may be the recent incident where Frontier Airlines kicked 26 already-boarded travelers off of plane due to weight issues.

Calibrating flight weights is nothing new.

Years ago, I was heading to Dallas on business. There was a tremendous headwind, and when we got to Atlanta - I can't remember whether this was a scheduled stop or not - we were told that 10 people needed to get off so we'd have enough fuel to make it to Dallas.

I remember being shocked that the weight tolerance was so fine grained. But it never occurred to me to volunteer to get on the next flight. Now I'm thinking I'd be happy to get off rather to worry that we were going to drop from the sky because of collective BMI overage and end up in a cornfield somewhere. 

I used to travel on occasional business to the White Plains (NY) airport. This was a very small airport and the planes were weirdly shaped Fokkers, reminding me of refrigerator cartons. I always wondered how they could get and stay airborne, but somehow they did. But not before they asked (or guessed) what people weighed, and balance us from one side of the plane to the other before we took off.

Then there was the 6-seater my husband and I took from Rossaveel (County Galway) to Inishmore. When we bought our tickets, the clerk told us that there'd be a weigh-in at the airport. I joked that it wasn't going to be possible to lose 15 pounds overnight, but the clerk assured me that it was all very discreet.

Ah, the Irish.

When we got to Rossaveel, there was the scale, next to the check-in counter, as big and bold as Big Ben, and facing the passenger seating area. 

Discreet, me royal Irish arse.

For some reason, there was blessedly no weigh in. Maybe because there were only 3 passengers and the pilot on the 15 minute flight.

Anyway, at Frontier they decided that size mattered, and they bounced an 26 "unsuspecting" passengers off a flight.

Inevitably, there was someone on the plane to record and TikTok the event:

At the onset of the clip, the pilot is heard communicating with passengers over the intercom system.

“Unfortunately, with the weight issues we have we’re going to have to remove 26 people,” the pilot says.

He adds that the gate agents are aware of the safety

issue and “will be taking care of this.”

The pilot apologized and said it was an “unforeseen issue,” and their “hands are pretty tied at this point.”

“Good luck and thanks for your patience,” the pilot says at the end. (Source: Daily Dot)

The call had been made by the Frontier loadmaster, a role I wasn't familiar with.

A loadmaster is responsible for deciding how baggage and cargo will be organized on an aircraft, according to Indeed. They also calculate the aircraft’s weight to determine how to secure passengers and cargo in a way that won’t disrupt the vehicle’s center of gravity. 

Guess they decided that the cargo was more valuable than the passengers. But the weird precision of 26 - not 25, not 27 - passengers...And what happens if everyone they picked weighed a skimpy 100 pounds, when they needed an average of 150...

Naturally, I would have been pissed to have gotten the heave-ho, but on reflection would have been just has happy to have been part of the Jetsam 26

As for the pilot wishing the passengers "good luck," what was that all about?

Those who stayed on board certainly needed as much "good luck" as the kicked-off extras. Especially after they learned that, although bound for San Juan, Puerto Rico, they were going to be landing in Orlando.

Ah, the joys of air travel.