You Get To Me, You're Always Outta Champagne

In last Saturday's Wall Street Journal Eric Felten pined for the good ol' days of highflying libations:

Now there's no expectation that the flight attendants should have cocktail-mixing knowledge beyond an ability to distinguish the minis of vodka from the minis of gin. But in the early days of air travel, cocktails were an essential part of the luxuries provided. In the late 1930s Pan American World Airways had a fleet of flying boats called the "Clippers." The biggest of them, the Boeing 314, featured a cocktail lounge at which various proprietary cocktails were mixed in silver shakers, including the Clipper Cocktail -- rum, dry vermouth and a dash of grenadine.

A few years after the war, Pan Am was flying Boeing Stratocruisers, and among the plane's selling points was that it featured a downstairs cocktail lounge. As they would on Boeing 747s decades later, passengers got to the lounge via a spiral staircase. The idea for devoting so much space to a lounge wasn't just about pushing liquor. Travelers were used to the freedom of roaming the decks of a ship or wandering the length of a train and found airplanes confining. The lounge gave them someplace to get up and go to; the cocktails gave them a reason to get up and go.

The various indignities that one has to endure when traveling by airplane these days could be somewhat alleviated if you at least could get a decent drink once you've finally made it to your seat. I don't expect flight attendants to be "bartenders in the sky," but is a little basic knowledge of mixology too much to ask?

I don't know how many times I've been frustrated by their inability to answer such simple questions as, "What kind of Scotch do you have?" or fill such simple requests as, "with just a splash of water." After looking on in dismay as I receive a glass filled with one part Scotch and six parts melting ice one time too many, I've taken to explicitly ordering one glass with the whisky and one with water to avoid the horrors of dilution.

And these experiences are not limited to a certain locally based carrier not exactly renowned for superior customer service either. It happened to me while flying on Singapore Airlines, oft-touted as the epitome of world class air travel. In hindsight, I probably should have ordered a Sling.