My sister flew on Pan Am from Europe to Toronto on the 1-year anniversary of the Locherbie bombing. She was one of six people in economy in a 747 brave enough to fly Pan Am on that rather symbolic day. She had no idea she was so brave. She didn’t connect the dots until after she’d boarded.
Superb flight. After take-off, she immediately went to the middle row, raised all the arm-rests in a 4-seat row, arranged a bed for herself and slept wonderfully well. When she woke up about half-way through the flight, the hosts were bored silly and looking for any excuse to bring her stuff. “More snacks? How about a drink?”
The closest I got to that was a roughly 1/4 full Thai Airways flight out of Bangkok not long after the Asian Financial Crisis of '97. The Thai baht had crashed and had little value outside the country, so nobody was leaving if they didn’t have to. People were wandering from business class to economy because it was more comfortable having three or four economy seats to yourself than a single business class seat. “Out, bourgeois pigs! Those seats are reserved for the proletariat!”, I wish I’d said.
