Airtroductions

What fun is this?

Hoping to ease the nightmare of flying next to a crashing bore, a company in New York will match like-minded passengers to help make the time fly.

Inspired by a flight where he found himself happily seated next to Miss Texas, company founder Peter Shankman says he set up AirTroductions to give travelers a chance to choose their seatmates.

"It is for anyone who travels who does not want to have to deal with the psychological hell of sitting 2 inches from someone you don't know for eight hours," he said.

One of my greatest flying pleasures ever took place in early 2004. I had a Sunday afternoon flight from Denver to Milwaukee, and I was seated next to a young woman from an Ivy League school I forget which) who was on her way back to her classes. She was dressed in the shabby, grubby manner of an activist, and her oversized purse was plastered with buttons shouting out feminist slogans and political buttons for Clinton-Gore, Gore-Lieberman, Howard Dean, John Edwards, and John Kerry (she was obviously covering her bases). So I sat quietly beside her until just before take off, at which point I pulled out a couple of issues of National Review to read and watched her squirm for three hours. I waited and waited for her to say something, but not a sound came out of her mouth the entire trip.