I’ve just taken my first Ryanair flight. It was a good experience, and while the removal of the magazine pocket might make storing in-flight stuff difficult, it certainly improves leg room. Good swap in my view; shove your reading material into your pockets. Or talk to your neighbour, as I ended up doing, a very pleasant student of Physics and Philosophy heading to Dublin for a Muse concert. I had to admit to never having heard of muse; talk about feeling old.

Anyway, the thing that struck me was interesting was that the cabin crew used a sensible technique for the headcount. Rather than struggling to count up the actual number of heads, they counted the empty seats. On this flight there were only 18 open seats, a much more manageable number to hold in your head, and with the benefit that they don’t move around.

My rocket scientist friend Jean Chevallier had long ago suggested that this was a much better match to the requirement of knowing exactly how many people were on board, but this was this was the first time I’d seen it happen.

So thought for the day: look for simpler, more reliable ways of doing things.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 9:51 am and is filed under travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.