Unfortunate Truths about Flying

There are a few things that I like less than flying, for example shutting my head in a heavy car door, sitting through a middle school choir concert, or finally cleaning out the other refrigerator, you know, the one that sits in the garage and accumulates a diverse array of leftovers in various stages decay. Of course, if people ask how I feel about flying, I stoically tell them that I am actually quite a fan, I just drop off to sleep and it's the easiest thing in the world. I am lying when I say this.

Now that we have some perspective, let me explain why I do not care for flying. While it is often bone-numbingly boring to sit in a crowded tin box, hurtling through the air for five to six hours while crossing the Continental U.S., there is also the fact that so much about how the flight progresses is beyond your control.

You cannot control., for instance, how full the flight is going to be. In fact, sometimes the crew will tell you, "This is going to be a full flight, if you're one of our pecuniarily challenged passengers and will be boarding last, we will perform a courtesy bag-check for you now, so that we can proceed to packing you all into this sardine tin as quickly as possible." While they say this, it might not be entirely true, and you will enter the plane to find more than enough overhead space. I usually don't mind this, in fact I secretly hope for a full flight on the first leg of my journey so that I don't have to drag a huge duffel around the airport with me. Unfortunately sometimes this is not the situation that you find yourself in. The crew says nothing about how full the flight is until you get onto the plane and realize there isn't enough room to blow your nose let alone store a bag. I always conduct myself with the utmost grace in these situations, relying on my sweet face to persuade people to let me stick my bag over their seat. Not everyone is as naturally graceful as I, and that is why you will sometimes find yourself watching the following drama play out:

A very sunburnt woman with about five children sidles down the narrow aisle until she reaches her seat (right across the aisle from you, so you have the best seat for viewing the approaching calamity). Her shoulders are so sunburnt that you can see pieces of peeling skin fluttering in the unnatural breeze produced by the plane's A.C. unit. Realizing there is no room immediately over her seat (partly because your pink, black and white duffel is taking up the valuable overhead real estate), she turns upon  the nearest flight attendant, not so much asking for help as snarling why there isn't any room. The flight attendant, a 50-something Midwestern type with a bronzy complexion, politely asks how many bags she needs space for. "Four of these rolling suitcases" says Leprosy Shoulders. The flight attendant, let's call her Bronzy, says in a weary way, "You should have checked them at the gate, we really don't have a lot of room or time to play Tetris. We need to get off the ground before it starts raining." Leprosy Shoulders goes red in the face and nearly screams, "Like, we tried but they said there would be room and wouldn't check them for us!" Bronzy gives her a stern look and says, "Don't talk to me like that, please." in the way that your grandmother might say it, that sort of no-nonsense tone that brooks no dispute. Leprosy Shoulders clearly never talked to your grandmother, because she then said, "Like, really? Ugh. What are we supposed to do with these bags, there's no room!" She gestures wildly at the clearly full compartment over her seats. Suddenly Leprosy Shoulders' husband, a beleaguered man with a baby on one hip and two backpacks on the other shoulder, cuts in, saying very mildly, "Danny" (I suppose that's Leprosy Shoulders' real name), "Danny, just stop. Sit down." Leprosy Shoulders continues to mutter, occasionally raising her voice loud enough to make the rest of you passengers uncomfortable, but now Bronzy is ignoring her in a practiced and professional manner, directing the put-upon husband to a few empty spaces for his remaining bags. Unsurprisingly, their children were horribly behaved the whole flight.

The above story is an example of another thing you have no control over during a flight, and that is the conduct of other passengers. Cranky fellow sardines is at the very least a minor headache and at the worst infuriating. Then of course there are the sardines whose bodies recognize that they were never meant to fly, resulting in air sickness. I have the unusual luck of almost always sitting beside or behind whoever gets airsick on any given flight. Call it a gift.

You cannot control how long it will take the plane to get into the air or, once in the air, that it will stay in the air. If you weren't already worried about that, at the beginning of every flight, the flight attendants say "Please power down and store all electronic devices, return your tray tables and seats to their full upright positions. We will let you know when you can use your electronic devices again." They never explain why you cannot use your devices, but it is all very important and mysterious. I shan't pretend to understand how an airplane even stays aloft, much less navigates through miles of empty sky, however it has been drilled into my brain that any electronic devices on during take off or landing will cause the plane to drop out of the sky. This being said, I have a particularly unique situation and that is this: my phone, unbidden by me, will often turn on and off of it's own accord. I cannot control this when it happens and often do not even know it is happening. Because of my phone's rather independent manner of conduct, I live in constant fear that my phone will turn on during take of  or touch down and doom us all. I know for a fact that I have pulled it out of my pocket midflight to find it on when I turned it off at the beginning of the flight. It is all very stressful. I am actually writing this from somewhere above the Midwest, so if you are reading it, that means that I am paranoid without cause and that my defective phone did not cause a huge plane crash.

On a less dramatic scale, you also cannot control the flight attendant. When are they coming around with drinks? When will they return with a garbage bag or those little bags of roasted peanuts? Who knows. They keep to a secret schedule that they have sworn to share with no one. I was asleep during the first round of drinks and I have no idea when another one will happen, so I sit here with my dry mouth in the ridiculously dry air, wondering how long it will take me to shrivel into a human raisin. To her credit, a kind brunette flight attendant did stop by earlier and ask if I wanted anything since I was asleep during their first round. I croaked that I would appreciate a water and she nodded, smiling. That was thirty minutes ago. I have not had any water.

These are the things I am talking about. Some of them are petty, some of them are pretty big, but all together they accumulate into a long trip in which everything depends on other people. I don't know why that wouldn't make me uncomfortable.