The Crying of LOT Flight 15

Memorable seatmates, I’ve had a few. But the heavy man alongside me on this Polish flight was peerless. A chunk of flesh the size of a two-zloty coin had been freshly gouged out under his left eye. After I offered up my preflight warm towelette, he dismissed the gesture with a gruesome cackle, revealing that his front teeth had also been knocked out. Aware of my curiosity, the man curled his fingers into a feral claw, gestured toward the injury, and whispered “pussycat” in the Balkan-soaked English favored by 007 villains.

His menace was the least of my concerns on this LOT Polish Airlines adventure. In my imagination, Eastern European airlines excel in flying from airport of origin directly into the ground. A sweeping generalization, perhaps, but one seared in memory by Aeroflot 593, which plunged into a Siberian mountain after the pilot let his 15-year-old son take the stick. On this particular voyage from Warsaw to Newark, my anxiety had been stoked by a four-hour delay owing to an unspecified “mechanical” failure. All efforts to procure information only fueled my fear—airline employees were cryptic, a desk clerk cited a broken wing. The true predicament remained unknown, but by consensus it seemed fundamental. Travelers in the U.S. would have morphed into an apoplectic fugue state, but my fellow Polish voyagers barely shrugged. Rushing a mechanic at an Eastern European airport rarely ends well.