Bring your own blanket, pillow, pilot

If you begin noticing airline passengers lugging along their own personal security blankets next time you travel, don’t be surprised. You heard it here first.

Air travelers now bring aboard an ever-increasing array of comfort items. On a recent flight my seat mate turned into Mary Poppins, pulling from her bag apples, oranges, peanuts, string cheese, ear plugs, cough drops, chewing gum and even a fried egg sandwich. I kept waiting for her to yank out a fringed lamp shade and a hat rack.

It used to be that airlines wrapped us in a sense of comfort, if not luxury, to help soothe the reality that we were hurtling through the heavens in a shiny metal tube. They poured decent wine, tucked cloth napkins into our laps for dinner, and passed around hot, damp towels afterward. Passengers reciprocated by dressing up for the occasion, showing up for flights in wool suits and silk stockings. Those civilized days are long gone.

Now airlines are snatching even their flat, lifeless pillows right from under our very heads. Last month Delta announced it was discontinuing pillows on its flights. Those pillows weren’t much, but if you crammed them between the window and your seat just right, sometimes you could actually snooze right through that part of the flight that looks like it’s headed straight into the Great Salt Lake.

The timing turned out to be just right for one American entrepreneur, though. SuAnn Chow, a former Salt Lake businesswoman, recently brought out a new product line called Satori Pillows. She’s selling a micro bead-filled pillow and a matching fleece blanket in a clear plastic tote bag with a flap for your boarding pass and drivers’ license. The whole works costs $69.95, which sounds steep, but once you hear Chow explain things, the price tag begins to diminish in your mind.

The idea began when Chow, who flies frequently and always winds up cold, began to be grossed out by the hygiene of those thin, navy-blue flags of fabric the airlines call blankets. She’d unfurl one just to find it filled with crumbs and stray hairs. She began to wonder, if you shined an ultra-violet light over them, just how many micro-organisms might you find?

She claims even her own flight attendant sister refuses to use them. They don’t necessarily get changed after every flight.

“Most people try not to think about it,” she says. “You’d never go to a hotel room and accept the fact that they don’t change the sheets or the towels regularly.”

Don’t laugh — remember last year’s flap over doctor’s ties? A study released last May showed that those dry-clean-only ties harbored pathogens that might just travel with the doc from patient to patient.

During a telephone conversation Chow thinks aloud about all the coughing and sneezing that surround airline blankets, the sick little kids who huddle under them, the makeup and hair oil and drool of snoring passengers, and as she talks, I’m about to zip online to order a blanket myself.

And then I wonder, just what’s next? I notice that one of those travel catalogs sells battery-powered personal air purifiers. You just wear them around your neck and hope to avoid breathing in any “virus-containing microdroplets” floating in the cabin air.

But what haven’t American innovators thought of? What else will we need to pack?

I’m imagining a day right around the corner when I’m tucking into my carry-on my own portable yellow oxygen mask. It’s against the rules at the moment to tote your own oxygen aboard the plane. But I can picture the dawn of a new era ahead when the flight attendant says, “In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, don’t look to the overhead compartment. Pull out your own darned oxygen.”

In the meantime, I think a blanket couldn’t hurt.

At the security gate, I now take off my shoes, pull off my jacket and offer up any offending jewelry.

In full view of my fellow passengers, I quietly submit to wanding, to underwire bra patdowns and to oddly intimate inspections of the metal snaps at the top of my jeans.

Once the TSA adds full-scale strip searches to its routine, just imagine how handy a blanket will be.