GRRRR! Not another one! It sounds like this woman is a spectacularly huge tosser in all honesty.

“I guess we are simply fortunate that my eardrum was exploding and I was swallowing blood. Had it not been for that, I would have dragged that kid out of his mother’s arms and stomped him to death. Then we would have an ‘international incident’,” Ms Barnard allegedly wrote.

Hmm… She sounds like a nice person (anyone remember Mrs Deagle from Gremlins?) If you don’t like screaming kids then stay at home where they can’t annoy you. If you get on a plane you can expect to encounter the odd screaming kid, it’s a fact of life. What said tosser probably doesn’t realise is why kids actually scream on flights; their ears are affected much more by the pressure and they’re screaming generally because they’re in immense pain. It seems fairly reasonable to me that a young child would scream when it’s in pain and doesn’t know what’s going on.

As for a child creating enough sound to perforate an ear drum, it’s perfectly possible for a close range shout (as in literally right in your ear) to be way above 110dB so it’s very possible it might cause damage if sustained for any length of time. In this particular case it seems extremely unlikely the kid directly caused her ear drum to perforate. Frankly I think Qantas should have done all they could to wipe the floor with her and turn her into an example of just how utterly stupid people can be at times. Maybe not allowing her to fly due to ill health and making her continue her journey back to the States by boat would have taught her to STFU and stop being a tosser!

Paul