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The thoughts expressed here came to light after reading “The Art of Travel” by Alain DeBotton. You can check out his work here.
If you are no stranger to flying you know that there is that moment when you are sitting on an airplane at the gate, the last passenger hurriedly rushing down the aisle slamming overstuffed shopping bags into unsuspecting shoulders, and you hear the unmistakable thud of the cabin door closing and locking into place. In just a few short moments, your world will change in an instant.
It’s been slightly over a year since I have had that feeling. I was sitting on the tarmac at Boston’s Logan International Airport on a very windy evening, looking out at the sparkling skyline of New England’s vibrant epicenter. I was heading back to North Carolina after a meteorology conference and the world was about to drastically change.
The first cases of COVID-19 were popping up in Boston and while I didn’t realize the magnitude of how the world would change over the next couple of months, I had a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach that this could be it for a while. Metaphorically, a strong cold front had just come through the night before, and what had started out as an unseasonably warm week for January in this part of the world suddenly felt very ominous.
Throughout the last year, I have often wondered where my next trip on an airplane would be and when that would occur. Fortunately for me, the loss of travel has been one of the greatest impacts of the pandemic and I am sincerely grateful for that. So many others have lost so much more and my heart goes out to all of them.
As I started to picture myself on an aircraft again, I started to explore what makes air travel so satisfying and in my mind, one of the most incredible accomplishments the human race has achieved thus far.
Let’s take a journey.
An Exercise in Trust
I am definitely not a person that is afraid to fly, but admittedly it’s also the only time I routinely ask God to get me safely to my destination. Maybe that’s because when you stop and think about the premise of what you are about to do when you fly, it all seems a bit absurd.
The maximum takeoff weight of a Boeing 737 is roughly 175,000 lbs or about the weight of 13 and a half African Bush Elephants. I know Dumbo flew and all, but it just seems a little ridiculous that the wings are going to support that kind of a payload.
There is also the fact that you are basically flying in an oversized soda can with a very thin wall separating you from 35,000 feet worth of pure atmosphere, and you are doing it without a parachute or any other mechanism in place to alter the final result of that unwanted scenario.
The wonder of all of this really comes down to one thing. How much do you trust other human beings. The answer is probably more than you would like to let on.
I often talk about a popular leadership exercise in which you try to identify all the people responsible for helping you get your cup of morning coffee, in order to show how interconnected we are. Doing this for air travel is certainly a fun exercise.
If I want to fly to Rome, I can do that in about 8 hours. Why is that exactly, and who am I depending on to get me there? The pilot is only the very end of dependency chain that goes back through flight attendants, airport workers, air traffic controllers, plane mechanics, engineers, programmers, raw materials processors, and on and on and on.
In the end, it is a synchronous ballet of people working together to get the job done and every single time, without fail, I have gotten to the destination of my choosing, sometimes a little later than others, but still arriving.
Despite my prayer ritual at the start of every flight, it has less to do with me asking God to get there than it does human cooperation and innovation. That is something we can all be thankful for.
Air Travel Exposes the Juxtaposition of Human Life
When you are alone on an airplane you have a beautiful opportunity to stop and think. Solo flyers certainly experience this more than say a family traveling with young kids, who has their hands full just trying to survive the next couple of hours. Been there my parent friends!
Part of this is because you have to turn your phone on airplane mode or off completely. Forced disconnection from the electronic world is a beautiful thing because it connects you to the moment and to the world immediately around you.
What fascinates me is observing everyone’s frame of reference. Each of us as humans has a different story, a different journey we are living. Our fellow air travelers all share this particular flight in common but everyone’s ultimate path is very different.
If you fly into to a major hub, like Charlotte Douglass International Airport, There is a good chance that many people on your flight woke up in different cities from all over the world.
Some business commuters traveling in short hops just to get home before dinner, some embarking on the first leg of a longer trip, potentially to the other side of the globe. I could be sitting right next to someone who started the day at a Parisian bakery, eating a croissant and is now finishing up a very long day of trans-Atlantic travel, while I waited for the sun to break the horizon in my Massachusetts hotel.
This feeling is only magnified as you walk the terminal to your next plane. Each gate you pass, a different city. All connected by the hub, we might share a drink at the bar in Charlotte, but those people at the gate over there will be in Detroit in three hours, those over there in San Francisco in seven, and still more over there in Tokyo in fourteen. I wonder what they will do first when they land and what the weather is like where they are going.
In the air, I wonder the same about those locations I am flying over. As I fly down the eastern seaboard of the United States, someone underneath me is reading a book in a quiet corner of a bookstore in Providence, Rhode Island studying for the MCATs. A taxi driver is picking up his next ride in Manhattan, wondering if Uber is going to put him out of business, and a Senator in Washington D.C. is trying to lobby votes to pass legislation she co-sponsored this morning. All oblivious to me flying 30,000 feet above their heads going from Boston to Charlotte.
As the plane begins its final descent, the Queen City comes into view. Motorists crowd into small spaces on I-85 trying to get through suburban construction in the northern suburb of Kannapolis, shoppers pour out of IKEA in Concord, and the bright lights of Bank of America Stadium are on as the Carolina Panthers try to salvage a playoff game against the Minnesota Vikings. (Artistic license provoked here for effect. The Panthers haven’t been in a playoff game since 2017.)
After a very quick layover, and a short hop home, I find myself deposited in the parking lot of Albert J. Ellis Airport in Jacksonville, North Carolina in the middle of an empty field northwest of town, eerily silent after disembarking from the last flight in of the night.
On the drive home I’ll cross the mouth of the White Oak River where it meets the Bogue Sound and flows into the Atlantic with the quaint town of Swansboro on my right. The Captain Phillips fishing trawler is bobbing next to the dock and small waves lap onto the shore.
That morning, I had an egg sandwich at Tradesman Coffee Shop and Lounge on Batterymarch Street in Boston, not far from where a group of independent minded folk, some 250 years ago, threw tea into the harbor in protest of the British Monarchy. Above my head, an American Airlines flight is making its way from JFK to Miami.
Air travel is a beautiful thing.
