Noise cancellation tech works best for low-pitched constant-ish sounds, like the airplane engines, or noise from a fan. Noise cancellation doesn't work well on higher-pitched, oscillating sounds, like screaming or voices.
This is probably why the grand-old parent recommends earplugs in addition.
> This is probably why the grand-old parent recommends earplugs in addition.
Ya. Exactly. The noise cancellation works great to remove the engine noise. But as soon as you turn them on, high-pitch sounds become a lot more apparent. Earplugs help alleviate that.
Crying is, by its very nature and purpose, difficult to tolerate and ignore. Even for loving parents, taking a baby on a flight can be incredibly tiring and trying. What's wrong with offering passengers the chance to be a few rows away from the noise?
What? Really? This is the main conclusion you draw from this article?
Society isn't intolerant of children, society sees that there is a market for increased comfort in airlines, and that "peace and quiet" is an integral part of comfort.
That's the real solution, charge more for small children and use the extra charge to reduce prices of the seats nearby. It should be prohibitively expensive to bring a crying child on the plane.
BS, Parents have to fly sometimes and upping the cost will do nothing aside from harming parents by making them pay more. It won't deter people from flying at all. Believe me as a Parent the airlines make it difficult enough to fly, that very few parents do it without a pretty compelling reason.
Even if it did reduce the number of children on board, that's a worse solution than the problem currently is. Children learn by doing, including manners on planes. Remove a generation of children from anything and you'll have a generation that has no idea how to behave during that activity.
I guess I should have wrote infants that are unable to stop crying. I'm fine with children if they can manage to not kick the seats. Upping the cost enough would prevent parents of infants from flying and it would be wonderful.
I travel quite a bit for my job and I never leave home without my foam earplugs, and by the way, I have found that for me, the foam earplugs open up the ear canal and help with the cabin pressure changes on the plane. Also, they work great for getting to sleep in noisy hotels.
Just got off from a Singapore → Taipei Scoot flight today; sat in the quiet zone. Compared with the other flight where a family placed their loud baby right behind me, this is pure bliss.
I’ll happily pay up to $500 for guaranteed silence.
ps. Active noise cancellation might work; however you’re usually not allowed to use electronic devices during takeoff or landing. Speaking from my experience, babies don’t really cry when the plane is coasting, they’re triggered by jitters.
Belated material — Malaysia Airlines bans babies from first class outright [1].
If you're trying to focus on something it is a problem. I hadn't even considered the sleep part of this, I was thinking about reading, programming, etc, all of which will be derailed by a screaming baby.
Weird, for me it's exactly the opposite. I remember the horrors of an 11 hour flight from LAX to AMS with a baby yelling away for the entire flight and not a chance to sleep.
I hear you loud and clear, though. It just didn't occur to me that this could be a problem for such a short period of the flight.
If the child is in a group of other humans, the louder it cries the more likely it is to be noticed. The more annoying the cry is to other people, the more likely it is to get help.
Humans always lived in groups, so being loud and annoying has huge evolutionary advantages over being quiet.
Even today children crying gets them shaken violently in some cultres. I can't imagine pre-historic humans to be more well-tempered and tolerant than today. It doesn't make sense.
Not really, it's just that we find it difficult as adults to empathize enough to understand what's bothering them. Children cry because they're hungry, because they've got gas, because they're sick or uncomfortable, because they're overstimulated, or because they're bored. Since they eat every few hours, have developing digestive systems, have developing temperature regulation systems, and have no internal monologue and short attention spans, one of these things becomes a problem very frequently.
As they get older, they cry because they have no emotional regulation (something that isn't fully developed until after adolescence). If I snatch a candy bar out of your hand you were about to bite into, you feel that initial pang of loss but quickly your higher faculties regulates that emotion. If I grab a piece of "floor food" my 9 month old is about to put in her mouth, she feels that same emotional response, but there is nothing to regulate it.
There will never be anyone around able to empathize enough to understand what's bothering them. Why bother crying?
Why don't kittens, baby rabbits or calves cry that loud that much? Instead they happily crawl around. What makes human babies so problematic and miserable?
Compared to most other animals, human babies are born more helpless and dependent on those around them (for example, most other species have young that are able to crawl or walk already).
I believe the theory I've heard goes something like: It was beneficial for humans to start walking upright, but that development puts selective pressure on having a narrower pelvis for increased stability. Having a narrower pelvis implies having a smaller birth canal, which in turn puts pressure on having a shorter gestation period.
Not knowing the reason is not the same as without reason. A child may cry for seemingly silly reasons (there's an excellent Tumblr blog "reasons my son is crying") but there's generally a reason.
They don't cry for anything - they cry for a narrow set of reasons that occur often. Babes are frequently uncomfortable, upset by their surroundings, etc. They have very few valid reasons to cry, but their environment provides those particular stimulus very often.
It is rare for a child under the age of 6 months to cry for no reason. Children under this age cry to communicate a need - they are in pain, they are hungry, they are cold, they are scared. Once the parent has met the need the child will stop crying.
It is incredibly traumatic for parents to have a crying child - the cries are evolved to be distressing to make parents assess the needs. Support groups exist for "cholic" (baby crying with no apparent reason).
Even over this age children usually have a reason to cry. They don't just cry for the sake of crying.
1000 times this. When airplane starts to descend my ears do funny thing. I begin to hear everything like from under a meter of water. My ears also hurt like hell. And it doesn't stop. On my first flight ever, I suffered for half an hour waiting for this feeling to pass. No amount of swallowing helped. Then I told my friend about it and he ssugested that I blow the air out through the nose while holding it shut with my hand. Presto. I was back with the living. If you could somehow do this manouver to an infant that started crying on descent.... Otherwise you are funding him about an hour of really painful torture.
This method is also described in that flight magazine on page 53 or something. Should be on the cover.
> If you could somehow do this manouver to an infant that started crying on descent.... Otherwise you are funding him about an hour of really painful torture.
Chewing/swallowing tends to accomplish the same thing, which is why it's recommended to give them a bottle during takeoff/landing.
I've experienced this to different degrees in my travels. One time it felt like I was being stabbed in the brain with an ice pick for the entire 6 hour cross country flight and no amount of blowing/swallowing/yawning would help.
My sarcasm meter might be off, but regardless, this is nonsense. You can easily mitigate the pressure issues by giving your kid something to snack on or a bottle during takeoff and landing.
All three of our children have been very happy to fly. They seem to find the engine noise soothing when they're infants, and out 4-year-old loves machines, so he's been thrilled anytime we get on a plane anytime for the past few years.
That said, I'd be happy to be put in a "family friendly" part of the cabin, and leave other audibly sensitive travelers to their piece.
It surprises me how poorly airlines integrate lap infants into their booking process. Often with domestic carriers there's no way to indicate that you're bringing an infant with you until you get to the checkin counter. Seems like poor planning.
as a kid, and now as an adult I've had generic allergies that have caused eustachian tube disorder(s) throughout my life.
Airplane rides cause agonizing headaches for me for about an hour after landing, and there is little to be done about it other than waiting through it. It sucks. The first time I experienced such a thing I felt as if I was going to be permanently deaf or disabled due to it, it's that bad.
As tired as I am of screaming babies on planes, this seems silly. For one thing a crying baby can reach WAY farther than 4 measly rows.
But mostly I get the impression that jerks like me did enough grumbling, and this is a way for the airline to seem like they give a crap, which of course they do not.
It would seem to me a much simpler solution would be for airlines to offer earplugs on all flights. That way, babies can cry and businessmen don't whine.
If cigarettes are to be any guide, it won't be long before children are banned from planes, children have to stay 50 feet away from hospitals, and eventually most people stop having children at all.
We, as members of society, are putting less pressure on each other to reproduce, probably because our society's tech level & processes can't support many more humans than currently exist.
Having used Etymotic in-ear headphones for well over a decade, I won't get on a plane without them. As in, I once drove back to the office at 4am the morning before an early flight because I realized I'd left them there.
Assuming you've got a good fit, they act as -25dB earplugs with no music playing. Playing music at a moderate volume over that provides a huge masking effect[1] to external sound. Cranky babies, loud talkers, aircraft noise, etc. are all muted to nonexistent or at least very tolerable levels. About the only thing that gets through in my experience is the "bass effect" of a child kicking the back of my seat...
Other brands of in-ear monitors (IEMs) should work fine as well. The key is to ensure you use eartips that provide a good seal and comfortable fit. Most brands ship with different size tips, and you should make sure you can get replacements in your size. The eartips do wear out and need replacement with regular use. In my case, I mostly notice that they start getting oddly uncomfortable.
[1] As in "psychoacoustic masking principle", also leveraged to "hide" quantization noise in lossy audio codecs, ala MP3, AAC, etc.
I just arrived from a 12hr+ flight from Madrid to SF with 2 babies just behind me that literally, in the correct sense of the term, screamed the entire flight. I'm a tolerant person, but banning babies, or having no-baby flights, seemed like an extremely reasonable thing to do.
Whether airlines charge for this dubiously-implemented perk is meaningless. It's a business transaction for transportation, end of story.
As a parent who has had the dubious pleasure of flying with children of my own and experiencing the children of others, here's a far more important takeaway:
As shitty as it is for you to experience a miniature crying human, it is ten times shittier for the parents. The emotion you should be reaching for is pity—for the child that can't communicate its desires, and the parents who are desperately trying to divine what baby wants before dying under the weight of every. single. person. staring. at. them.
As for the parents who apparently "ignore" their misbehaving kids—there are no lack of poor parents out there, but more often than not, ignoring is the fastest path to ending a tantrum ("don't feed the trolls"). It's doubly difficult to do when a plane full of people are giving you the evil eye.
I second this. If most parents are anything like me, they avoid flying with their small children as much as possible. What a nightmare.
However....
Sometimes you just _have_ to fly somewhere. Anybody demanding that babies be banned from airplanes probably doesn't realize that this would be a severe discriminatory measure against women with small children that try to keep their career from dying.
My wife had an important once-every-few-years scientific conference when our daughter was one year old (and still breastfeeding). Being from Germany, it was bad luck for us that the conference happened to be in Korea. It was either don't go and miss out on countless opportunities or make two 12 hour flights with the baby.
In the end I went along as a babysitter and we flew to Korea, enduring some hours (fortunately not the entire flight time) of crying and stares.
Small children are a part of human life, and a noisy one to say the least. If you have them and still want to build a career, you cannot always go for the "I don't want to bother anyone" route.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadTurn up the music/white noise to get past the ear plugs just a little bit.
No sounds get past this.
This is probably why the grand-old parent recommends earplugs in addition.
Ya. Exactly. The noise cancellation works great to remove the engine noise. But as soon as you turn them on, high-pitch sounds become a lot more apparent. Earplugs help alleviate that.
Society isn't intolerant of children, society sees that there is a market for increased comfort in airlines, and that "peace and quiet" is an integral part of comfort.
They aren't charging more for children to fly.
Even if it did reduce the number of children on board, that's a worse solution than the problem currently is. Children learn by doing, including manners on planes. Remove a generation of children from anything and you'll have a generation that has no idea how to behave during that activity.
I’ll happily pay up to $500 for guaranteed silence.
ps. Active noise cancellation might work; however you’re usually not allowed to use electronic devices during takeoff or landing. Speaking from my experience, babies don’t really cry when the plane is coasting, they’re triggered by jitters.
Belated material — Malaysia Airlines bans babies from first class outright [1].
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2009386/Child-free...
I hear you loud and clear, though. It just didn't occur to me that this could be a problem for such a short period of the flight.
Maybe the low cost stated ($10-25) is because it's for such a short part of the flight where you get the benefit.
My only idea is that children cries is a side-effect of their brain development.
Humans always lived in groups, so being loud and annoying has huge evolutionary advantages over being quiet.
Even today children crying gets them shaken violently in some cultres. I can't imagine pre-historic humans to be more well-tempered and tolerant than today. It doesn't make sense.
Hmm, I'm guessing you are child-free? In my experience, it's not normal for a baby to cry for no reason.
I'm only replying to present a diff. point of view in case people go away thinking it's normal for a baby to cry for no reason.
Not really, it's just that we find it difficult as adults to empathize enough to understand what's bothering them. Children cry because they're hungry, because they've got gas, because they're sick or uncomfortable, because they're overstimulated, or because they're bored. Since they eat every few hours, have developing digestive systems, have developing temperature regulation systems, and have no internal monologue and short attention spans, one of these things becomes a problem very frequently.
As they get older, they cry because they have no emotional regulation (something that isn't fully developed until after adolescence). If I snatch a candy bar out of your hand you were about to bite into, you feel that initial pang of loss but quickly your higher faculties regulates that emotion. If I grab a piece of "floor food" my 9 month old is about to put in her mouth, she feels that same emotional response, but there is nothing to regulate it.
Why don't kittens, baby rabbits or calves cry that loud that much? Instead they happily crawl around. What makes human babies so problematic and miserable?
I believe the theory I've heard goes something like: It was beneficial for humans to start walking upright, but that development puts selective pressure on having a narrower pelvis for increased stability. Having a narrower pelvis implies having a smaller birth canal, which in turn puts pressure on having a shorter gestation period.
Not knowing the reason is not the same as without reason. A child may cry for seemingly silly reasons (there's an excellent Tumblr blog "reasons my son is crying") but there's generally a reason.
This is false.
It is rare for a child under the age of 6 months to cry for no reason. Children under this age cry to communicate a need - they are in pain, they are hungry, they are cold, they are scared. Once the parent has met the need the child will stop crying.
It is incredibly traumatic for parents to have a crying child - the cries are evolved to be distressing to make parents assess the needs. Support groups exist for "cholic" (baby crying with no apparent reason).
Even over this age children usually have a reason to cry. They don't just cry for the sake of crying.
What is 10x more infuriating is a six year old screaming at the top of its lungs, with the parents either ignoring or smiling happily.
This method is also described in that flight magazine on page 53 or something. Should be on the cover.
Chewing/swallowing tends to accomplish the same thing, which is why it's recommended to give them a bottle during takeoff/landing.
It's a form of Eustacian tube dysfunction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustachian_tube#Disorders
My ENT recommends taking a hit of Afrin nasal spray during takeoff and again just before descent.
That said, I'd be happy to be put in a "family friendly" part of the cabin, and leave other audibly sensitive travelers to their piece.
It surprises me how poorly airlines integrate lap infants into their booking process. Often with domestic carriers there's no way to indicate that you're bringing an infant with you until you get to the checkin counter. Seems like poor planning.
as a kid, and now as an adult I've had generic allergies that have caused eustachian tube disorder(s) throughout my life.
Airplane rides cause agonizing headaches for me for about an hour after landing, and there is little to be done about it other than waiting through it. It sucks. The first time I experienced such a thing I felt as if I was going to be permanently deaf or disabled due to it, it's that bad.
But mostly I get the impression that jerks like me did enough grumbling, and this is a way for the airline to seem like they give a crap, which of course they do not.
link: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/airplane_layout
Why should the burden of the negative externality lie on the recipient and not the creator of said externality?
The market will sort it out. I would pay more, lots of people would pay more. The demand curve speaks louder than words.
Assuming you've got a good fit, they act as -25dB earplugs with no music playing. Playing music at a moderate volume over that provides a huge masking effect[1] to external sound. Cranky babies, loud talkers, aircraft noise, etc. are all muted to nonexistent or at least very tolerable levels. About the only thing that gets through in my experience is the "bass effect" of a child kicking the back of my seat...
Other brands of in-ear monitors (IEMs) should work fine as well. The key is to ensure you use eartips that provide a good seal and comfortable fit. Most brands ship with different size tips, and you should make sure you can get replacements in your size. The eartips do wear out and need replacement with regular use. In my case, I mostly notice that they start getting oddly uncomfortable.
[1] As in "psychoacoustic masking principle", also leveraged to "hide" quantization noise in lossy audio codecs, ala MP3, AAC, etc.
As a parent who has had the dubious pleasure of flying with children of my own and experiencing the children of others, here's a far more important takeaway:
As shitty as it is for you to experience a miniature crying human, it is ten times shittier for the parents. The emotion you should be reaching for is pity—for the child that can't communicate its desires, and the parents who are desperately trying to divine what baby wants before dying under the weight of every. single. person. staring. at. them.
As for the parents who apparently "ignore" their misbehaving kids—there are no lack of poor parents out there, but more often than not, ignoring is the fastest path to ending a tantrum ("don't feed the trolls"). It's doubly difficult to do when a plane full of people are giving you the evil eye.
However....
Sometimes you just _have_ to fly somewhere. Anybody demanding that babies be banned from airplanes probably doesn't realize that this would be a severe discriminatory measure against women with small children that try to keep their career from dying.
My wife had an important once-every-few-years scientific conference when our daughter was one year old (and still breastfeeding). Being from Germany, it was bad luck for us that the conference happened to be in Korea. It was either don't go and miss out on countless opportunities or make two 12 hour flights with the baby.
In the end I went along as a babysitter and we flew to Korea, enduring some hours (fortunately not the entire flight time) of crying and stares.
Small children are a part of human life, and a noisy one to say the least. If you have them and still want to build a career, you cannot always go for the "I don't want to bother anyone" route.