There is nothing worse than a wailing infant. It has to rank up there with one of the most irritating sounds known to humans. And when you’re paying a cool R70 000 for a return ticket to travel in a first class suite aboard an Airbus A380, you certainly don’t need to hear a baby crying.

Malaysia Airlines first introduced the policy banning infants from its Boeing 747 first class cabins back in 2004, whether they were lap-bound or had ‘paid’ for their own seat.

Yesterday, the airline’s chief executive, Tengku Azmil Zahruddin, stuck to his guns ahead of delivery of the first of six A380 superjumbos it has ordered for the second quarter of next year. He took to Twitter to express his reasoning:

We do not take infants in 1st Class whether on their own seat or on the lap. We do lose some revenue but many ppl complained.

Naturally, one would complain at those sorts of prices if a baby was wailing the entire flight, and one was just supposed to deal with it. And, as expected in this humanistic time we live in, Zahruddin had his critic’s whinging about the airline’s stance pretty much immediately.

So, like any good chief executive, he defended himself with a good ambiguous comeback tweet:

As I said earlier, it is a tough call. There will be unhappy [passengers] either way.

Referring to the November 2004 revamp of the Boeing 747 first class cabins, which saw a seat reduction of 18 to 12 in the cabin so the luxurious ottoman seat could be accommodated, the airline again defended its bold move in a statement:

As a result of this seat revamp and the introduction of the ottoman, there was no facility for positioning bassinets in the first class of the B747s.

I know one can buy noise-cancelling headphones these days, but that still shouldn’t be used as an excuse to avoid the piercing sound a baby can make.

[Source: AFP]