Flying is Awesome

Mon Jan 10th

 As anyone who has had the misfortune of talking to me in the last several months can attest, I have been travelling a lot lately and dutifully complaining about many of the inconveniences that come along with air travel. 

 

Airport security workers have started giving out flowers prior to body cavity searches.

Image by kansasphoto

Airports are awful.  They are full of inefficient and frustrating processes, long, long walks from one point to another, inane rules that seem designed only to ensure that everyone who boards a plane is as angry and frustrated as possible.  And those stupid regulations in place for safety like showing your boarding pass and ID to four different people between when you get to the airport and when you get to the plane, as though a terrorist is going to fumble around and say “Gee, I don’t have an ID.  I think I’ll just go home.”

Terrorists will quit, however, if the line is long enough.

Image by gadl

Airplanes are like modern torture chambers.  The seats are too small for average sized people let alone larger people.  The curvature of the back of the seat must have been designed for a small marine mammal, because no human could be comfortable in that position.  “Upright and locked position” is really a codeword for “Now it’s time to strain that muscle in your back again.”  The seat bottoms might float, but they leave your ass bruised unless you constantly shift your weight.  Depending on the plane, the seat in front of you might pin your knees in place so that you can’t move.  And no matter what you do, when you get off of a plane, your joints will be stiff because outside of international business class, you simply can’t go through the range of motions necessary to sustain the motility of a primate in an airplane's passenger compartment.

Boeing's executives asked their interior designers to follow this template as closely as possible.

Image by herval

Other passengers are a pain in the ass.  Maybe they are big and smelly and overflowing into your seat.  Maybe they are loud.  Maybe they have a baby who cries for hours on end.  Maybe they have a toddler who enjoys kicking the backs of seats like it’s the entry to nirvana.  The best case scenario is that you have a pleasant conversation and the person goes away never to be seen again.  In other words, the best case scenario is sort of like social masturbation.  It seems like fun at the time, but there is no real point to it.  But what the heck, you’re going to do it again anyway.

Airports are awful.  Airplanes are awful.  Other passengers make things worse.

But flying is awesome.

 

You only wish you knew what the view was like from one of these babies.

Image by wtlphotos

Wish Granted.

Image by josefstuefer

No matter where you are flying or what time of day, there are breathtaking views.  A sunset from the air is amazing.  Flying up through a thunderstorm and coming out into a bright sunny day with a beautiful sea of clouds below is wondrous.  Looking at the streetlights of a city dot off in geometric patterns off to the horizon brings a poignant amazement at the lives and toils of thousands or millions of people that were necessary to bring about the city.  Flying over deserts with large green circles cut out where farms grow, or flying over mountains and watching the weathering patterns as they crumble and flow downstream, or flying over lakes dotting a brilliant green landscape, or flying over a muddy river meandering towards its delta — it’s all amazing.

Someday NASA will make clouds just solid enough to sleep on.

Image by eschipul

Today I flew over the Grand Canyon.  There may be no more majestic a storybook of the earth’s history.  It is a storybook of evolution — fossils of animal forms long gone and climates and ecologies that once were, one on top of the other, told in layers of rock deposited over millions of years, subsequently cut through by a small river over thousands of years to expose stratum after stratum until finally it reaches bedrock.  One day all of the soft upper layers will be gone, but for us, we live in the lucky time when the entire storybook is laid out before us in breathtaking fashion.

Go here.

Image by trodel

No matter how many times I get on a plane, I will never cease to be amazed.  Even if it means sitting in accommodations that are dramatically less comfortable than a third world bus it’s an experience that I just don’t get tired of.

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