If you want your pillow, don't sit in the exit row

Late yesterday evening I flew from Melbourne to Cairns, on the northern eastern Australian coast. It's the departure point for most Great Barrier Reef trips; I'm taking mine tomorrow and Thursday. This was also my first experience with domestic Australian airlines, a shoot-off of Virgin Atlantic named Virgin Blue.

At check-in, the attendant asked me if I wanted to be seated in the exit row. Well, duh, of course I did. However, Australian flight attendants are militant about their exit rows. Not only can you not have anything under the seat in front of you for the entire flight, you cannot even have a pillow and blanket during take-off and landing. They make you store them in the overhead bin or threaten to relocate you (Cailin, you can relate to this, I'm sure).

I have been on a lot of plane flights in my life now, and I have NEVER encountered any regulations like this. I was told that the blanket could interfere with departure from the emergency exit. If we have to leave via the emergency exit, I'm thinking my blanket is going to be the very least of anyone's worries.

What really pissed me off, though, was the attendant's assertion that stringent rules such as this account for Australian airlines' "excellent safety record." Now there's a beautiful example of someone messing up correlation and causation. No, I think Australia has an excellent safety record because 1) until recently they only had one major carrier, Qantas 2) the weather is excellent and they don't have to deal with snow and ice on their planes and runways, and 3) the overall volume of flights in Australia is quite low, compared with the US and Europe. I don't think my not being allowed to have a blanket in the exit row has a damn thing to do with it.