Smart Travel: Have your ever heard of Landing Lips or gate lice? Know the flight lingo
Ive learned its also not always as simple as the lice being drawn by overhead luggage needs. After years of travel, I have learned that gate lice are a genetic form, not dissimilar to the steerage passengers of the past. The issue is not with them, (they will be drawn to an open gate like a moth to a flame) the issue lies with the airline who make the mistake of mixing such unsophisticated passengers with the noble, 1st class executive class.
Gate Lice
Passenger, often inexperienced flyers in Kettle Class, who crowd around or line up at a gate at an airport completely blocking the boarding area and preventing First and Business Class passengers from being able to get on the plane when they’re allowed to. They can also cause delays and confusion if a passenger in a wheelchair needs to board as the chair has to plow through the mass of gate lice hovering around the gate.
When it’s time to board, they have to be shooed from the front boarding area to the back of the line, delaying the flight for everyone.
“We should probably head to the plane early before the gate lice show up”.
“I don’t understand why those people were being gate lice. Don’t they know Zone 4 means you board last ?”
Gate Lice
Like nasty little bugs they clog up the ‘follicles’ of the gate boarding process. An itchy irritant that further fuels the stress of modern day air travel. They merge and swarm when anything is announced, even ’10 minutes until we board’ will draw out the most aggressive gate lice to hover around the boarding area, slowing everything down and infuriating considerate travelers.
Ive learned its also not always as simple as the lice being drawn by overhead luggage needs. After years of travel, I have learned that gate lice are a genetic form, not dissimilar to the steerage passengers of the past. The issue is not with them, (they will be drawn to an open gate like a moth to a flame) the issue lies with the airline who make the mistake of mixing such unsophisticated passengers with the noble, 1st class executive class.
You may have to get physical when wading through gate lice at a gate.
I hope we don’t see too many gate lice today, they have been more agressive recently.
Gate lice
People who crowd the boarding area at the airport who have no business being at the front of the line.
Derek – “I was flying home yesterday and I had boarding group 1. I couldn’t get to the front of the line because there were too many people crowding in front of me. and they were in groups 5 and 6.”
Peter – “Yeah, those Gate Lice are afraid the overhead bins will get full.”
Derek – “Dude!!”
Smart Travel: Have your ever heard of Landing Lips or gate lice? Know the flight lingo
Ever heard of gate lice? Lounge lizard? Deadheads? Or, even a ‘five’ happily becoming ‘fifer’, ‘three’ turning into a ‘tree’ without a qualm. ‘George’ might not be the name of a bonnie boy, it is just another word for ‘autopilot’, and ‘Wilco’ is a cute abridged version of ‘will comply’. A ‘dinosaur’ is not an extinct animal, it is the senior most flight attendant and ‘A/c’ is not air conditioning, it is an abbreviation of aircraft. Air conditioners are just ‘packs’. Not heard of these? Or heard too many at an airport or inside an aircraft? As the world remembers the only flight of Spruce Goose, the $25 million, the 200-ton plywood eight-engine flying boat of Howard Hughes that flew a mile at an altitude of 70 feet on November 2, 1947, let’s learn the flight lingo.
The most widely used radiotelephone spelling alphabet (also known as the ICAO phonetic alphabet) cuts confusion between the V and B, the C and Z and the S and Yes. Each letter of the alphabet is assigned a word: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-Ray, Yankee, Zulu.
If the pilot is saying ‘tree’, he actually means ‘three’, and a ‘wun’ is ‘one’. These are standard pronunciations for the numbers: Ze-ro, Wun, Too, Tree, Fow-er, Fife, Six, Sev-en, Ait, Nin-er.
When a pilot says ‘pan pan’, he is not merely being repetitive. Pan Pan is another way of saying ‘urgent’ but not an emergency. The term is also used to signal for the pilots to stay quiet so that air traffic control can focus and decide if there is need for an emergency landing.
One can never find angels peeping from the clouds, but if you ever hear a pilot say he is at 30 angels, just assume that the aircraft is flying at an altitude of 30,000 ft. But if you turn the plural angels into ‘angel in the sky’, be certain he is referring to a rescue helicopter.
It is more of a military aircraft jargon and rarely used in commercial flight, but a ‘feet wet’ is flying over the ocean while ‘feet dry’ is flying over land.
Concourse shoes are the high-heeled pumps flight attendants wear to walk though the airport before changing into comfortable flats once in the air. Landing lips are quick application of lipstick by cabin crew before landing in order to look fresh for the buh byes.
Not related to The Grateful Deads nor a spoiler alert of a horror film. A deadhead is a crew member flying as a passenger to get to work. For example, a flight steward might be deadheading to San Francisco to work on a flight back to London.
A jumpseat is the the fold-down chairs that the cabin crew buckle into during take-off and landing. The Sharon Stone jumpseat is the one that faces the passenger and well, if you have watched Basic Instinct and remember Stone uncrossing her legs and showing more than required, you’d know why it is named after Sharon Stone.
‘Gate lice’ are the annoying air passengers crowding the boarding gate before their seats are called. They are often the most hated of all travellers.
In an aircraft, it is a soul count not passenger count, specially in an emergency. Technically, ‘passengers’ is the number of seats occupied, ‘crew’ is both the pilots and flight attendants on duty. If only ‘passengers’ were counted, it would exclude ‘lap children’. So, it is always a soul count. Remember, any dead passenger is not included in the soul count. Simply put, ‘souls’ effectively communicates the number of living humans on board.
A crew member who doesn’t have a crashpad and doesn’t want to pay for a hotel between trips and sleeps on the couch in the lounge overnight.
A pilot often mentions the local time at take-off and landing but Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the baseline of international time zones. It is the ‘Zero hour’ and because Z is Zulu in the international phonetic alphabet, this baseline time is usually referred to as Zulu time.
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