(dave e)

aircraft

My feelings about airplanes and what they do and what happens when we get on them are overdetermined. My family never really flew anywhere. I rode on my first airplane as an infant and wasn't on another until my junior year in high school. No more flights until my first year after college. Add to my unfamiliarity with Mach .8 at 35,000 feet a more general unease with heights - no roller coasters for me, thanks - as well as what might diplomatically be called an anxious disposition. The result, of course, is a sometimes acute fear of flying. A good friend of a good friend, who flies for a regional subsidiary of a major American carrier once lifted his eyebrows when I expressed my fear of flight and, wielding more power than he could imagine, asked, "Oh, don't like to go up in the steel tube of death, eh?" (He has since more than made up for it.)

Marrying someone who has flown regularly all her life, someone whose parents "fall asleep as soon as the plane backs away from the terminal and don't wake up until parking at the next one," someone who flies to subsaharan Africa relatively often, has gone a long way towards alleviating my panic on planes. As I repeat pretty regularly, I've flown from Frankfurt to Johannesburg, a distance few are lucky enough to travel. That helped. As of a few weeks ago, I've been on three common commuter planes, the Canadair RJ *, the Dash-8, and the ATR 72. I've flown across the Atlantic on the Triple-Seven and the A340. I stretched my legs w-a-y out in the emergency exit row of a Lufthansa 747, as it zoomed along between Frankfurt and Jo'burg.

Probably all three of my kind readers have been on most, if not all, of the same planes. My curse is that, as a flyer who used to go into panic attacks at take-off, suffer a thoroughgoing sense of dread during much of a flight's cruising, and sigh only when the reverse-thrust began to slow us down on the runway, I get off on plane minutiae (nb: that's a pretty ridiculous term, here, as many of an aircraft's details are the "minutiae" that keep it in flight). Natalie calls it plane p.0rn and suffers through my routines in airports and on planes... "Hey, did you know that this plane has winglets. Look, those little vertical extensions at the wing's end. They make flight more efficient. I saw a documentary on Discovery Wings about them. The 747's are, like, eight feet tall. Speaking of which, did you know that the A319 we rode to San Fransisco is, like, totally going to replace the 737, which some refer to as 'the workhorse of American commercial aviation'? Oh, yeah, totally. All those new JetBlues are Airbuses. Except Airtran's fleet is going to be all 717s..." This goes on until we make the final turn for departure. Then I shut up and look out the window. In the old days, hyperventilation kicked in. Now, I just breathe deeply and shiver at how fundamentally astonishing it is that we can take a seat in this big thing that roars along up into the sky.

Look, if the alternatives are an obsessively Romantic epistemology of air travel or tachycardia and nausea at the thought of flying... Besides, I'm with Patrick Smith **, the psuedonymous "Ask the Pilot" columnist/author, who, while sympathetic to the ugliness of the WalMart-ization of American airlines, insists that we take too lightly the fact that one can look out a window and see the expanse of a landscape, as one casually zips from continent to continent. Even if it blows to sit between smelly obnoxious tourist families who think the whole plane needs to know how they feel about the French, even if it blows to pay $500 for a late and bumpy flight, even if it blows to wait two days for misplaced luggage, you still get to see the Mississippi River from 38,000 feet, something too few flyers appreciate. You still get to fly from BWI to Nashville for less than $100 and in less than two hours. You still get the feeling of powerful lift as you and several tons of airplane first float off the runway.

Here are the things I noticed during my recent marathon of flight:

1. United lets passengers listen to Air Traffic Control on Channel 9. I love that. Love is probably not a strong enough word. When I hear "United Nine-Zero-Three Heavy, make your heading one-eight-zero," and I feel the plane turn, or when I hear, "United Nine-Zero-Two requesting flight level three-eight-zero"..."United Nine-Zero-Two, make your flight level three-eight-zero," feel the plane climb, and realize that our pilot's request for a less bumpy ride has been accomodated, I am pleased. I don't pretend to understand everything I hear, but a lot of it is pretty intuitive ("ride reports" from aircraft to determine relative turbulence at varying altitudes, etc.), and some of it is just plain nice. I love it when my plane's pilot is able to be polite to the different controllers with whom he or she communicates. Sounds absurd, I imagine, but, again, to the nervous flyer, all signs of calm and normalcy are good.

2. For each of our flights on regional-communter aircraft, we had to walk across tarmacs. I was like an eight year old (as is probably obvious, all of this makes me sound like an eight-year old). The sensation of walking around down there with the planes was great. Smelled like jet fuel (I have no way of knowing whether or not that's what I was actually smelling, but it was certainly fuel-ish, and there were certainly jets around) and sounded loud. And we saw planes at eye level at all kinds of airports. Washington National's matter-of-fact button-down D.C-ish-ness in the midst of high-volume and hurried travel (got to see them constituents, after all). Atlanta Hartsfield's crazy mix of cosmopolitan rush-rush-rush, "we're the busiest airport in the country" pride (O'Hare disagrees), and southern mannerism. Munich's oh-so-German precision - those planes were lined up straight, dammit. Chattanooga's quiet, hosting only two visible commercial planes, one belonging to each of the airlines we used to fly in and out at Christmas and the week after (USAir Express and ASA-Delta Connection, respectively). Charles De Gaulle's patchwork of liveries from all over the world... That post-Aeroflot Tupolev with the Cyrillic text down the fuselage really did just come in from far Eastern Russia, and that 747 really did just come in from Sydney, and that A340 really did just come in from Nairobi.

3. If you want empirical evidence of suburban sprawl, fly on a turboprop (lower altitude) out of a major metropolitan area, say, Atlanta, at night. The lights never end. That city needs to be reigned in.

All of this, and the A380 just got its formal debut today. The 7E7 hasn't even been made yet...

All of this, and I'm still an uncomfortable flyer...

* For all linked images, I've tried to locate photos of aircraft arriving, departing, or taxi-ing at the airports into or out of which I've been on said aircraft. The appropriate airlines are aso represented. As the most casual viewer will see, Airliners.net is a captivating site; it's gotten away with many of my hours.

** I've also been known to refer to him as "my therapist."

Posted by dave at January 18, 2005 9:46 PM | TrackBack