Adult only planes

Rosalyn, that’s what I was made for. A private ✈️ Shame that I haven’t got the means?

Forgot my other airline aid, a set of noise cancelling headphones, plug into the entertainment or your own phone and it blanks out everything else, all for £25.

The middle seat in a middle row has nothing to commend it.
Private jet it is then. ?

Sit in the middle then.

Sit at the rear of the cabin and you get stuck by the lavatories.

Adult only flights - forget it, even business class does not guarantee a quiet flight, far too expensive to try to segregate passengers.

One tip, families with babies are usually given the seats with extra room at the front of any cabin, so choose seats to the rear for yourself. Personally I always take a couple of paracetamol at the start of the flight which relaxes me and makes me sleepy.

drunks are worse than children - serving alcohol 24/7 in airport departure areas should be banned. Re children - with a heavy heart I sat across the aisle on a flight to Sri Lanka, to a family of three small children and their mother. It was amazing. All three had separate goodie bags, with colouring stuff etc. The wonderful mother produced food when necessary and made up titbits for later from the meals handed out. The oldest girl (about 8) looked after the 5 yr old and the mother concentrated on the baby. When the children were tired mother tucked them up under blankets and they slept. It was a revelation. I congratulated her when we disembarked - what a fabulous family.

You do get some irritations on planes however it's not the children who are a pain in my experience it's the person sitting behind you on a night flight who insists on talking for hours on end when you are trying to sleep.
Unfortunately ear plugs don't always work.

I think that we should have "quiet" flights no chldren under the age 0f 12, no drunks, no alcohol and no phones. Just decent people wanting to travel in peace.
CurlyWhirly You may like children around you when you are on holiday but when you work with them 39 weeks a year you need a break. So i understand Adult only hotels.

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I have travelled widely, usually long haul, with two children. Both made their first trip at 3 weeks old, with the second one I had to cope with a two year old and a newborn! We clocked up an average of 12,000 miles each year and not once did either child cry for more than a minute or two.

Why? Because as a mother I anticipated their needs, knew that they needed to suck during take off and landing and came prepared with things to distract them. Children sleep easily on flights, much as they do in a car.

Problem is people don’t seem to know how to parent. Their children are almost feral.
The look of bewilderment I have experienced from mums when I had to suggest the child was screaming because of ear pain is a revelation. A hard sweet to suck on brings almost instant relief. They don’t bring drinks, snacks, toys, books, anything! No child can sit peacefully for hours with nothing to do.
Adults who get drunk are worse. No alcohol should be available in airports or on a plane.

I always fly Business on long haul flights. I occasionally have children near me but they are usually very well behaved. On domestic or european economy flights my absolute bete noire are elbows. Usually men, with an elbow on each arm rest. If they do so much as move I get my arm in quick as a flash and sit with it rigid ?. The other annoying activity is when passengers who are separated from their friends or family, all congregate round a row of seats in the aisle preventing others from passing and lean on my seat taking up my space. They're usually wearing white tracksuits, from which one can view the builders bum as they bend over, oversized white trainers & a baseball cap on backwards ?

In normal times (remember those), I flew often and whilst I agree some children were a pain it was really down to the adults with them not controlling them. I don't have children but even I know they get bored easily and need entertaining.

I was on one flight when a father and his young child were sat next to me, the father had come prepared with books and pencils and kept the child engaged the entire flight - he was a delight.

I fly Club class and the children are further away and better behaved.
I’m a snob but we gave up on economy when we retired. It was too traumatic for all the reasons mentioned above.

So glad i never fly

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I've never encountered either noisy children or adults on long-haul flights with Singapore or Qantas.

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It may be a personal choice, but as I said before (see above, my first reply), just "paying more" simply wouldn't work. Commercially and for valid safety reasons it just isn't going to happen that a whole plane would have age restrictions.
There is, if course, always a choice to fly business class/first class with a high end scheduled airline rather than a chartered/holiday airline if you have that kind of money to spare. No guarantees you would escape children even then, but it is unlikely that most families could afford to travel in such luxury very often, so that's your best chance.

Sorry, but I would pay more for a child free flight. It's a matter of choice. I would not want to be with badly behaved screaming kids.
I said sorry but it is just a personnel choice.

Dillyduck, you say the hostess ignored it, but what would you have expected or liked her to do? She can only offer some assistance, but that is sometimes rejected by the parents, as any intervention panics them. May be, in their eyes, it suggests that they are in some way inadequate?
Sometimes, parents move the fractious baby to the galley, but this rarely works to calm the child down.
It is a very small space filled with 3 hot ovens and pots of boiling water, and 2 or 3 crew frantically trying to run the on board service (around other people "just stretching for a moment" and doing yoga poses whilst queuing for the loo ?). From a safety angle (let's remember, that's the whole reason why we are there!) it's a nightmare, as we could be sued for the slightest splash of hot water. Much as we would like to, we are not allowed to pick up/handle the passenger's babies, (again, for obvious reasons). As you can appreciate, there are only 4 of us with 189 passengers to serve and assist in a very limited time. For an older child, we can offer Olbas oil on a hot tissue in a cup (to help any ear pain by breathing in the vapour), but this is not suitable for young babies. All they can do is feed from a bottle to help ear pain (similar to an adult sucking on a sweet). If a plane isn't full, we do offer to move parents with babies so that they have more space, but you will appreciate this often isn't possible. In the summer it isn't uncommon to have 50 children and up to 18 babies on laps, all on one plane to Majorca! It's carnage?. However, at this time of year our planes are mostly adults only, by default. The destinations in winter tend to attract what we call "empty nesters" ...(parents/grandparents who have no longer have children at home), which brings with it other challenges (older people who have limited mobility and underlying health conditions, where our first aid training comes into focus on a regular basis).
Any suggestions for screaming babies (within our safety limits) would be gratefully accepted! I know how awful it must be to draw the short straw. I wish we, as crew could please everybody all of the time, but sadly, we rarely can!