The Zipperless Flight

I love flying. Lots of people complain about how cramped it is, and the food is terrible (if you can get any), and so on. It seems like people tend to forget something about plane travel though: You’re fucking flying!!! That should be the slogan for every airline – "United Airlines. We can fly!" "Virgin Airlines: Holy Shit, We’re Flying!" Good God, you can get from one coast to the other in a few hours, and people say, "Yeah, but it’s mildly uncomfortable." Yeah, that was Lewis & Clark’s chief complaint too – the lack of leg room and stale air.

I especially love take off. The sudden blast of speed, the ground suddenly dropping away beneath you, you get higher and higher, until your brain can no longer comprehend how high up you are and everything just looks interesting. Great stuff. I even love airports, which might make me clinically insane. The energy and raw emotion of separation & reunion, the excitement of going somewhere new and break from routine. So I’m probably a little weird.

Oh, sure, there’s the fiery crash part of flying, but I had this weird moment once some years ago that sort of ended that for me (mostly). I was flying from Ireland to Scotland in the dead of winter. Icy plane, low visibility, and so forth. The stewardesses on this particular Aer Lingus flight – and I’m not trying to be funny because they’re Irish, I’m just reporting the facts – we’re drunk. And if the stewardesses were visibly drunk, we can only assume the pilots were having their stomachs pumped up in the cockpit. So, we’re over the Irish Sea and the plane is bumping and so forth. I was feeling a tad edgy. I was thinking to myself, ‘What if we crash?’ When a very calm voice in my head said, ‘You’d die. But, hey, you really, probably won’t crash.’ And, oddly enough, I felt much better, and have loved flying ever since. The statistics about how you’re more likely to be struck by lightening while scratching your ninth consecutive winning lottery ticket (or whatever they use for those dumb comparisons) than be in a plane crash mean nothing to me. "You really, probably won’t crash" works for me, for some reason. And figuring, if it does crash, I die, and that’s all there is to that, was strangely comforting. Not that I’m claiming not to fear death, it’s just that there were no variables, either it is or it isn’t.

That being said, on the flight back from Philadelphia, the plane sounded like shit. Those were some terrible, horrible sounds. Clanking, grinding and lurching. If your car made the sounds this plane was making, you’d pull over. It sounded like the pilots kept having trouble getting the plane into gear, like the clutch was going out. One of the friends I was travelling with had never flown before, and she turned to me and asked what those sounds were and if we were okay. Of course I felt compelled not to reply, "That, my friend, is the sound of our horrible death. I hope you enjoyed this trip because it is the finale to your time in this mortal coil, and I would suggest we panic now." Instead I embarked on the line of bullshit we reserve for when the person next to us on the plane is worried about the sounds it’s making, since, of course, we never know what the sound is either. "That? That’s the landing gear retracting. And that ker-chunk-crash sound? That’s, um, the luggage compartments securing. Like how some car doors automatically lock after you go a certain speed. Yeah. That hideous grinding? That’s, ah, uh, that’s the regality… modification…cramulator. It’s supposed to do that. Everything’s fine. By the way, apropos of nothing, when’s the last time you told your family that you love them?"

So, see? Flying’s great.