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This Is Why Flight Attendants Hate It When You Order Diet Coke On A Flight

Image: CNN

If you are traveling with a good airline, chances are that your journey will be comfortable and the service will be excellent. That is only until the high altitudes make your ears pop and your mouth dry. The intelligent thing to do will be to gulp down some water, but the situation awakens your soft drink cravings too and you better not order a Diet Coke.

It is not because diet coke will kill you, it is merely because flight attendants hate it. A flight attendant writes her struggle with carbonated drinks on the flight blog These Gold Wings. The carbon dioxide in fizzy drinks makes them foam, and this foam is considerably more at higher altitudes. Pouring the foamed up drink in a glass just takes very long, and Diet Coke takes the longest.

Image: BloodSugarDiabetes.org

It may not sound like much of a problem but time is precious for the service staff, and it is even more stringent on shorter flights. The staff can usually fill three orders by the time bubbles go down in a Diet Coke glass. The attendant writes, “Pouring Diet Coke is one of the biggest slowdowns in the bar service and on the shorter flights those precious seconds count!”

A study at Illinois State University has confirmed that carbon dioxide levels in Diet Coke are much higher than regular Coke, making it much fizzier. So you may prefer finding out if the staff will let you keep the entire can instead of pouring sips in the tiny glasses. The chances of that happening are slim, but there is still a way of pouring coke that will reduce the pouring time.

The smart way of pouring coke is flipping it upside down entirely. It may sound like a recipe for disaster but the attendant writes, “What you can’t see is that the diet coke doesn’t come out of the can when flipped upside down until you lift it up and tilt it slightly. This is because the air pressure is keeping the coke in the can. It makes pouring the diet coke very controllable and reduces the chances of spilling or overflow.”

Here is the video to learn the “smart way” for all the impatient people out there.

 

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