Editor’s Note: February ‘10

By: Tobin Bennison

Article Category: Editors Note

I hate flying.

Now it’s not the waiting in lines, the security checkpoints, being cooped up with strangers for several hours at a time or the maddening delays that bother me. It’s the whole hurtling-through-the-ether-at-30,000-feet-in-an-iron-tube part that gets up my snout.

“If man (you know what I mean, ladies…) were meant to fly, he’d surely have been born with wings” has long been my motto, but it’s recently been supplanted with this one: “If man were meant to die a senseless, fiery death, he’d have been born with the ingenuity to fashion an Airbus A330-203 out of some nuts and bolts,” which unfortunately he’s managed to do.

Sure, planes work for the most part — I’ve taken them countless times and have lived to tell the tale — but I still haven’t come around to the idea of flying being a more expeditious way of traveling than walking, driving or hopping on a boat or train. I’m in no hurry. I can wait.

Maybe being so close to the ground might help me get a little damn sleep for change, you figure? Maybe I might get through more than two pages of a book or be able to concentrate on “Angels In The Outfield” for once? I dunno… (I swear I’ve watched that 20 times on various flights and I still don’t know if they win the game at the end or not.) I mean, is it really worth all the nagging uncertainty and banging around and strange noises? Is it worth the salmon lasagna and fruit cup?

Of course it is, once you greet your distant relatives at the arrival gate. But I always forget about that when I’m looking out the window over the stark, unforgiving tundra of say, Greenland. Or Nebraska. I just can’t relax. You wouldn’t know it by looking at me — I rarely fidget. I’ve given up taking booze and pills because I figure I’ll have to be in full possession of my faculties if anything goes wrong. Whether I could actually open an exit door in the heat of the moment though, I’m not sure about. (They’re probably more complicated to jimmy than they make them out to be.) I would, however, be able to kick out a window in a trice, bundle up my family and tumble Bruce Willis-style across the wing and jump into a soft snowdrift below, no problem. I’m even pretty sure I could thwart an attempted hijacking or act of mid-flight terrorism. God knows recent events got me good and primed.

The media has made all of us unofficial, unpaid sentinels of in-flight safety these days. And they’ve also managed to turn us into knee-jerk racial profilers. During my recent flight across the Atlantic, two vaguely Middle Eastern-looking men (though they could have been Greeks…) aroused my suspicion right from get-go. The first seemed a little too quiet and scowly, and the other was being far too nice to the infant making faces at him over the back of his seat. What were these two up to? I didn’t have much time to concern myself with them though, because a woman several rows ahead fell into the aisle in the throes of a seizure. A diversion, perhaps? The German crew snapped to attention and helped stabilize her (you know how they are…), and the patriarch of a large Italian family adjacent to her stirred briefly from his slumber, checked to see that it wasn’t one of his kin, and nodded off back to sleep unconcerned.

Typical.

I really need to stop flying.

Stay grounded,

The Editor.