flying on Saudi Arabian Airlines… and what they don’t want you to know

 

Flying from Amman to Kuala Lumpur (KL) was probably the most ‘different’ flight I have ever taken… the other possibility being the Madrid to Tel Aviv flight, where everyone decided to

1) Stay up and talk loudly through the entire red-eye flight
2) If they were a man, take off their button down to show their sweaty undershirt
3) stand in the aisles talking to people they weren’t sitting near and showing pictures of their family.  It was certainly a holiday atmosphere (it was the first day of Hanukkah)!

But the one we just took was interesting, too.

To fly from Amman to KL, across the entire continent of Asia, was only $260 per, making it by far the cheapest flight I have ever taken in $/mile.  Maybe they get a really good price on fuel in Saudi Arabia.

The deal got even better when you consider the meal service:  from Amman to Riyadh, a 2 hour flight, we were provided a scrumptious early dinner (5 pm), with a choice of Chicken, Beef, or Fish main course.  Then, after a 5 hour layover in Riyadh, we were immediately given the same delicious meal as a midnight snack.  With metal silverware that really shouldn’t be allowed in the air cabin.  We were provided a third full meal before we landed in KL.  That one was kind of an early lunch due to the time change. 

Before take off, Saudi Arabian Airlines always plays a prayer which, we were informed, Mohammad would recite before traveling.  It played on the TV monitors with a background of clouds floating by in a blue sky. This seems to me much more likely to help in the event of a real emergency than all of the usual stuff about air masks and seat belts. 

Before takeoff, the flight the attendants walked up and down the cabin spraying “harmless pesticide” everywhere.  Good thing they explained what they were doing, or it might have made us uncomfortable!

Cari was especially intrigued by the flight attendant uniforms, which combined a hat with a hijab (picture below courtesy of the internet).

It was my first time on a 777, and the first time in a long time that I had been on something so big (11 seats across).  It was very nice, and my knees didn’t even touch the seat in front of me when sitting up straight!

But where it got so fascinating that I had to take notes was when we started watching movies.  The Riyadh to KL flight was seven hours, and we had our own screens.  Cari and I watched an episode of 30 Rock together, and noticed that every mention of sex (however oblique) was simply muted.  Since the muted words were not (I think) ‘bad’ words, this did nothing to lessen the impact of the dialog.

We both watched ‘The Help’ where every time someone said ‘shit’ it had been dubbed to ‘spit.’  This was especially funny because shit played an unusually important role for a serious film, and because Cari did not notice the censorship until after the flight and we talked about it.  You will have to watch the movie to see why this was so amusing.

I watched ‘Star Wars: Clone Wars’ which was a PG CARTOON.  But someone felt the it necessary to blur the décolletage of the villain, who looked like a withered female Voldemort (maybe it would have been kinder to blot her entirely!).  Her leotard showed a tiny bit of her back, which was blurred as well.

By this time, I was so interested that I decided to watch a movie I knew well: ‘Batman Begins.’  These are some of the differences I noticed:

• In a movie with thousands of punches and kicks, the only blow edited out was where Rachel slaps Batman for contemplating revenge.  It seemed like a pretty important moment, and I can’t decide whether it was edited out because it was a woman rising up and slapping a man, or because they touched and weren’t married.
  
• They edited the police commissioner saying “god damned salvation army,” muting the word “god.” But they did NOT edit out the crooked cop claiming to “swear to god,” even when Batman responded with the semi-blasphemous “Swear to ME!”
  
• Bar floozies and the pool-swimming models were hacked out.  The scene were batman is teaching the secretary how to putt (with his arms around her) was cut out, and the scene made little sense afterward- that happened a lot.  In the final scene with Batman and Rachel, they cut out whole chunk of the dialog- I think because she touched his cheek.
  
• There is a scene where the DA gets shot in the back when he looks into a shipping container, and then is shot twice more while down, leaving no doubt that he is quite dead.  They cut out the last two shots, and I think they might have changed the sound of the first one from a heavy caliber BAM! to more of a tranquilizer dart THUFF! but I am not sure.
  
• The footage of the elevated train crashing through Wayne tower parking garage was cut out.  This may have been in the interest of time, or maybe crashing a train into a skyscraper is too sensitive of a subject.

Congrats if you made it this far!