Fly the Polish Skies--If You Dare

I've flown through hell and lived to tell the tale.

Everybody seems to complain about poor air service in the United States. When I returned from both Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations, I heard numerous dorm mates detailing canceled flights, unpalatable meals and lost luggage.

Gimmi a break.

When I flew from New York to Warsaw on Lot Police Airlines two years ago, I learned what a truly bad flight--a flight that should have been stopped on the ground out of mercy--really is.

Let's start with the plane itself. We were flying on a relatively new Boeing 767 but it appeared as if the plane had been retrofitted to 1950 standards. Duct tape--I'm not kidding--held seats together, and ceiling panels were falling down.

The ground crew did little to enhance my flight experience. The check-in agent refused to seat my asthmatic friend in the non-smoking section. It was full, she claimed, which was strange since we were the first to check in for the flight.

Or consider the in-flight staff. In a letter in the airline magazine, Lot's chief pilot explained that many Lot employees were stunt pilots in their free time. Our pilots seemed to have trouble distinguishing between this extracurricular pursuit and their day job.

The sharpness of the turn right after takeoff would have been more appropriate for a bumper car ride at the local fair. And when landing, the pilots set the right side of the plane down, and, then, with a loud bang, let the left side fell to the runway.

And our ever-helpful "stewards" and "stewardesses" (gender-neutral language was a low priority) knew surprisingly little about modern safety procedures." People did not extinguish their smoking materials. Tray and seat backs were not in the secure, upright and locked position.

And in-flight service left a lot to be desired, too. Attendants acted as though offering drinks to passengers was an undue burden. They spent the majority of the flight smoking in the crew rest areas (although why they needed to rest remains unclear.)

That the food was bad goes without saying, but this flight broke new ground in even this area. We were traveling to Poland as part of a Jewish youth group program, so our travel agent ordered all of us kosher meals. The means we got were more than kosher: Boxes if Passover Matzo. We checked our calendars; nope, it was June.

When we finally landed in Poland, an announcement came through the cabin, "We will be exiting from the back of the aircraft."

Front, back, I didn't care. Just as long as we were exiting.