We were on our epic tour of Australia and Hong Kong, involving four international flights, six domestic flights and an awful lot of driving. We soon found that the internal flights were a whole lot less stressful than the international ones - later check-in time, fewer restrictions, shorter queues, and so on. Several airports even had these handy machines where you could print out your own luggage tags to attach to your cases (you know what it's like trying to reattach those sticky tags around a loaf of bread? Yeah, that) before placing them on a conveyor belt and waving them goodbye - so much quicker than queuing up at a check-in desk. We were at one such airport (can't remember where - maybe I've blocked it out) doing exactly that. We put our jackets in the front pockets of our cases (which suggests it was Melbourne, as we were obviously flying somewhere warmer), attached the tags with some difficulty, watched them disappear on the conveyor belt then headed towards security.
Sadly, even for domestic flights, you have to go through the whole security rigmarole. Luckily there were no restrictions on liquids, but we still had to pop everything through the X-ray machine and put phones, tablets, etc. through separately. This was the point at which Lee realised he'd lost his phone. We searched his hand luggage. We searched my hand luggage. We searched both the boys' hand luggage. We went through our movements - where could he have left it? Then he realised exactly where he'd left it - in his jacket pocket. The same jacket we'd just waved goodbye to along with our cases.
Relieved we knew where it was, we made our way through security and headed for the departure lounge. Then it hit us - the phone was still turned on, and it was NOT in flight mode. 'Do you think it really matters?' we asked ourselves. 'No, probably not,' we answered, trying to convince ourselves. 'Why don't you Google it?' I suggested. 'Why don't you?' replied Lee, 'as you're the only one with a phone.' Fair point. So I Googled it. And it didn't make for reassuring reading. The signals transmitted by phones can potentially interfere with the flight controls or something. There are a number of plane crashes that have been possibly put down to mobile phone use. Basically, it would probably be fine but it might not. Was that a risk we wanted to take?
Obviously the answer was 'of course not'. But the next question was 'what the hell do we do about it?' The phone was in the suitcase, and the suitcase was possibly even on the plane by now. How much hassle would we cause by trying to get the phone back? How much of a delay would we cause? How pissed off would people be at us? Probably not as pissed off as they would be if we crashed the plane, we figured. So off we went to the information desk.
'Excuse me,' we said, somewhat tentatively, 'but we accidentally left a phone switched on in our suitcase.' We expected her to tell us not to worry, that phones causing crashes was just an urban myth designed to make us pay full attention to the safety briefing. Instead, she looked horrified. 'Right, okay, that's got to come off,' she said. She asked for the flight details and the colour of the case ('pink' replied Lee, rather sheepishly) and then got on the phone to someone in baggage. The good news was the cases hadn't been loaded yet. The bad news was Lee had to go back through security to locate the case and remove the offending phone.
So off Lee went to retrieve the phone while the boys and I went through to departures, sat down and waited. And waited. And waited. After a while, I started to worry. Where was he? It's not like I could phone him to find out. It wasn't long till the plane was supposed to leave, and the screen showed we were due to board at any moment. The enormity of it hit me - I was on the other side of the world on my own with two boys and no way of contacting my husband. If everyone started boarding, what should we do? Get on the plane and hope Lee joined us before we took off? Wait in the departure lounge for him regardless? Get on and fly to the next destination without him because buying one new plane ticket was cheaper than four?! The time was moving on. We should have been boarding by now.
Then there was an announcement. 'We're sorry for the delay, ladies and gentlemen. This is due...' - I hung my head in shame and waited for the bit about the idiotic passenger who left his phone in his case - '...to the late arrival of the plane. We'll commence boarding in five minutes.' I lifted my head up in relief, glad to see our error wasn't being broadcast across the departure lounge, just in time to see Lee walk through security.
It was all fine. We made it on the plane in time. We didn't cause a catastrophic crash. Lee's case even made it on the plane. I'm thankful the plane was late in arriving in the first place, or there's a pretty good chance Lee's case may have already been loaded by the time we'd realised the problem - and that really would have made things difficult. The moral to this story, of course, is take very careful notice of your phone at all times when at the airport. And try very hard not to think about the potential consequences of all the other people who don't think airplane mode is that important...
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