He notes, with a certain smugness, that the conversations not only interested him they also transformed the outlook of his new friends, replacing their stress with enthusiasm.Such mutually positive outcomes are certainly possible when seatmates talk this writer's parents, for example, met when seated together on a flight from Hong Kong to Bangkok but is it typical?
Parents often have to rely on the kindness of strangers to switch seats, if they were not able to reserve seats together on a flight.
The two had previously collaborated when Maroon 5 commissioned West to produce a remix for "This Love" and later developed a friendship while sitting together on a flight to Rome for the 2004 MTV Europe Music Awards.
Cooke also attributes the turn-around to peer pressure from other passengers, but that dynamic might apply more to charter groups than to strangers flying together on a single flight.
There's a wonderful moment when he and his new translator take seats together on a Navy flight to Guantánamo while Swift's assistant pointedly heads to the rear.
The plan is that these terrified prisoners will then wander brazenly around with him and some Iranian culture ministry officials, posing as producers and cinematographers, pretending to size up the scenery through letterboxed fingers etc, and then they all go home together on a Swissair flight.
Michael Robinson, the former Liverpool and Republic of Ireland striker who bizarrely became one of Spain's most popular television football presenters, once told me that he and Ballesteros had sat together on an Iberia flight one day, and were invited into the cockpit by the sports-mad pilot.
Police said the men were dressed in track suits and claimed to be members of Venezuela's Olympic weightlifting team, presumably because they suspected that a large group of young men travelling together on an international flight could arose the suspicion of customs officers.
"It's almost like you're forced into it," said Carla Caccavale Reynolds, a public relations executive from New York and mother of four, who paid $70 extra a head for herself, her husband and three of her children to sit together on a packed JetBlue flight from New York to Aruba for at total of $350 on top of the tickets.
Theoretically, if we were on a commercial plane together, and a flight attendant asked if there were a doctor on board, we couldn't ring the call button?" I asked, trying to put in perspective for Joel how correcting me was almost as ridiculous as his self-importance.
1 A.M. (Showtime 2) TAKE THIS WALTZ (2012) Margot, a young wife (Michelle Williams, above) in Toronto, finds herself attracted to a stranger (Luke Kirby) on a trip to Nova Scotia and is dismayed to discover, after sitting together on the flight home and sharing a cab from the airport, that he lives across the street from the charming row house she shares with her husband (Seth Rogen).
