Adults-only cabins? Never: I'm a travel journalist and this is why I LOVE babies on planes

Last year, Norwegian airline Corendon hit the headlines by announcing a flight with a cordoned-off 'Adults Only' section, where children are banned. As with so many stories regarding children in public places, it sparked fierce debate.

But I think children - and babies especially - are unfair targets. As a travel writer and journalist, I've spent 14 years earning my bread, in part, from taking planes to foreign locales (I'm so sorry, environment).

Over hundreds of flights, I've never found a baby as disruptive as a drunken lout. Or hen and stag groups, who have the power to make a plane cabin feel like 3am in a seedy nightclub, without the enticement of being tipsy and possibly scoring a snog. And then there are many, many men I've sat beside with a casual relationship to personal hygiene and a belief their flatulence deserves to be shared.

Babies do not compare. They're animated butter balls of instinct and curiosity. When they squall and wail on a plane - unlike the aforementioned parties - it's not for lack of respect for your jolly holibobs. Like so many of us, they’re just strung out in being stuck in a glorified steel tube, screaming through air.

More than this, though - I love babies on planes.

Norwegian airline Carendon has cordoned off a section on certain flights to allow for 'Adults Only' passengers. Folly, says Katrina Conaglen, whose time travelling the skies has been vastly improved by the presence of babies

Stay with me.

I can't convince you to be charmed by a tot in your cabin but I can encourage you to observe them with anthropological fascination. Instead of rolling your eyes at the sight of an amorphous sleep thief in your row, try and enjoy their sweet face - gormless one minute, dignified and inquisitive the next, bobbling atop a cherub-chubby body.

Or their baffling enthusiasm for things we find every day, like seatbelts or tray tables. How their contorted faces, when grumpy, look like miniature Winston Churchills, righteously affronted by the world before them. And if they smile at you it can pour right through you, like swigging fresh water in the desert.

Watching these cute sentient potatoes thrill to the immeasurable surprise of their new environment can be a cheering spark of life on what can otherwise be quite a tedious, uneventful journey.

I do understand, as well, and am deeply sympathetic to not liking babies. 

I get it. I know what they're doing wrong. They're smelly, sticky. Terrible conversationalists. Contribute little to society beyond bodily waste. Absolutely never pick up the tab.

Babies on planes are a welcome sight, Katrina argues 'because it signifies humanity's ability to accept the awkward for the sake of the greater good' 

And I don’t think babies should be allowed entry everywhere. Don’t take them to a Quentin Tarantino film. Fox hunting. A strip club is Right Out.

I’m not, in short, a paid-up member of the Cult of Unquestioning Baby Adoration. Some are little bleep words. But I love seeing them on planes because it signifies humanity’s ability to accept the awkward for the sake of the greater good.

Our value as people lies in how we treat the smallest, most vulnerable members of society - and babies are the smallest of the small, the most helpless of us. Wittgenstein said 'the limits of our language is the limit of our world'. When babies cry - preverbal, half animal, all instinct - they're trying to make their world bigger, trying to integrate themselves into ours.

No, it is not enjoyable sitting next to a piping loud, distraught baby. I have huge empathy for non-parents wishing for a peaceful passage, robbed of their calm. And equal disdain for lax parents who allow their 'precious bundles' to watch rowdy Peppa Pig episodes on an iPad or kick the seat in front of them without asking them to can it. But I think we need to take the rough with the smooth.

‘Child-free planes’ Reddit is a very funny internet rabbit hole in which people vent their spleen - anonymously - about how to deal with kids on planes. Suggestions range from sound-proofing the final few rows and making that the kid zone, to 'just chuck them in the overhead compartments' to 'banish them altogether'. The jokes, I love. But that final suggestion gets my hackles up.

People who say 'don’t take babies on planes' full-stop are suggesting that to procreate is to insist parents live in a hermetically sealed environment for a finite period of time while they upskill their sprogs. Punishing them for seeing that the world must be peopled. 

To which I say - raising a child ain't easy. It is, to paraphrase Jerry Maguire, an up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege. If anybody deserves a week in Tenerife, it's new parents.

'No, it is not enjoyable sitting next to a piping loud, distraught baby,' argues Katrina, 'but we need to take the rough with the smooth' 

I also wonder at people who moan about babies on a plane (yes, I’m well aware that sounds like a family-friendly sequel to Sam L Jackson’s 'Snakes on a Plane') - whether they're aware that they once, too - almost certainly - were a baby themselves. 

An infant Damien that inevitably drove their parents, and likely other adults, to swampy, heretofore unknown pits of frustration. We all were. I don’t want to break into Elton John lyrics, but having patience when new babies are having their time being, well, jerks - that’s the circle of life, innit?

So, to Carendon, I say: The idea children and their parents belong in what is, essentially, a plane ghetto for daring to travel suggests that anything that causes temporary noise, inconvenience, and distraction must be outlawed to soothe the ire of certain individuals.

It signifies that plane tickets belonging to the child-free are more valid than those belonging to parents with babes in arms, that collective, public spaces are actually their spaces.

If you believe that, how on earth do we ever integrate children into society, and arm them with the skills, morals, and grace to become thoughtful adults? What, I guess I wonder, makes you so special, and them - barely baked - worth ostracising?