Here is one I have been trying to find the answer to for years. I have asked flight attendants on airplanes all over the world. No one knows. No one even hazards a wild guess.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Doc, your prayers have been answered. First an inside secret: the bag does inflate, but only when you exhale.
Here’s the deal. Passenger oxygen masks give you a continuous flow of oxygen (as opposed to oxygen on demand, which only flows when you inhale). The oxygen obviously can’t flow into your lungs while you’re exhaling, so if there weren’t some way to store it temporarily it would have to be vented wastefully. The bag makes this unnecessary. When you start exhaling, your breath plus the incoming O2 flows into the bag. When a certain pressure is reached the bag stops filling and the rest of your exhaled breath, which contains more carbon dioxide, is vented through a port in the mask.
I was afraid somebody was going to bring this up. Strictly speaking, you’re right–the zone was divided by treaty between Iraq and Saudi Arabia on December 26, 1981. However, for unknown reasons the treaty was never filed with the United Nations and nobody outside Iraq and Saudi Arabia was officially notified or shown the text giving the new map coordinates. So legally speaking the U.S. government has to act as though the neutral zone still exists. Practically speaking, though, it’s well aware that it doesn’t.
