Baghdad Bureau Chief Not Seriously Injured

July 4, 2007 — -- Of all the dangerous situations you can find yourself in in Baghdad, I did not think playing badminton was one of them. I was wrong.

I landed in Iraq two weeks ago. A weeklong curfew had just been lifted, so the flight from Amman to Baghdad was packed. Royal Jordanian Airways had brought in a huge plane to deal with the backlog of frustrated would-be fliers. I was becoming something of a regular -- I have flown in and out of Baghdad nine times.

One of the interesting little facts you never hear about is how no one is crazy enough to man the controls of these passenger planes except South Africans. The Royal Jordanian flight to Baghdad is normally in a small jet, with just four seats to a row, two seats per side.

Greeting the passengers is typically a tall white or black woman who walks down the aisles speaking with what sounds like a slight British accent. Though we depart from Jordan and arrive in Iraq, no Jordanians or Iraqi pilots and crew appear adventurous enough for the crazy corkscrew landing pattern used to thwart RPGs, or rocket-propelled grenades. Until this last time.

ABC always flies its people business class when they go to war. My ticket said I would be sitting in seat 2A, so I wasn't worried about the mobs of people waiting to get on the flight. I imagined I would have a nice, fat leather seat and use metal utensils to eat lunch 30,000 feet above the earth. When the gate agent announced the flight would begin boarding, we were herded onto a bus and dropped off at the plane.

I walked up the stairs to the plane and was greeted by a Middle Eastern face. I wondered where my South African flight attendant might be hiding. I walked past the flight attendant to the sight of six seats in a the row, three seats per side! There was so little space between them I couldn't walk across the aisle to my window seat. I had to push up the empty seat in front of mine and step on the 2B and 2C.

Then I forced my legs down the back of the seat in front of me and tried to sit as far back in the seat as I could. I am 5' 11", 180 pounds, and my knees were unhappy. So was the 6' 2", 230 pound man who sat next to me. It wasn't only the South Africans who were gone -- the airline had moved all the seats up 5 inches so it could cram more and more people on.