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Last week I found myself needing to get from Traverse City, Michigan back to New York City. Eight hundred miles as the crow flies over Lake Erie; walking was out of the question. Nearly as daunting was thirteen hours of driving before hitting outer-borough traffic. Technically, the route is passable by water, but that would require looping around Nova Scotia. At the turn of the 20th Century, those were my options. Aside from the time issue, all three journeys would involve risk of death far greater than any I encountered on a daily basis.
But now, there is a mode of transport of a different breed. Last week, I paid $89 plus tax for an hour and forty-five-minute trip in a flying metal tube that took off in Northwest Michigan and landed in Queens. In the adjacent row sat a young toddler on the first flight of her life. Her mother and I were scared for her, especially when our initial ascent involved significant turbulence, our little sixty-seat plane ducking and twisting and shaking as it rose at a twenty-degree angle. Instead, the girl was all giggles and wide eyes. No fear, only wonder and awe at what she was experiencing. She couldn’t decide which window to look out: her side, which displayed the cherry fields and rowed suburbs of Traverse City, or mine, an alternating rush of blue sky and thick clouds.
Myself included, people have made a habit of grousing about commercial air travel. The food is bad, the legroom is cramped, and the airlines themselves Kafkaesque shills of bureaucracy. Yet it’s rarely said that the mere existence of ubiquitous, safe, relatively affordable air travel is a modern marvel. Flying metal tubes! I’m with the little girl next to me: airplanes are underrated.
“The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.” – Claude Debussy
The mechanics of flight are famously basic, or complicated, depending on who you ask. In short, modern airplane wings are curved so that air moves faster over the top of the wing than under the bottom. Higher airflow translates to lower air pressure, and the pressure difference between the top and bottom of the wing creates lift force perpendicular to the motion of the object (wing) through the fluid (air). Notably, the mechanics of space travel are quite different; since there is no fluid (air) in contact with the wings of a spacecraft in the near-vacuum outside the atmosphere, there is no way to generate lift.
Unlike other complicated machines, riding on an airplane provides physical intuition for the mechanics under the hood. To first leave the ground, the aircraft uses the runway to gain enough speed to generate a meaningful difference in pressure around the wings, allowing lift to overtake gravity. Once in the air, planes reach a steady speed that maintains altitude, and, in the absence of acceleration, lets us passengers hold on to the illusion that we aren’t moving hundreds of miles per hour. As a kid, I was fascinated by the experience of driving on straight highways, moving so fast relative to my surroundings yet in complete equilibrium with the contents inside the car. I liked to imagine what might happen to a flying insect or a tossed marble; would they splat against the back windshield or hang in suspension with the rest of us?
Turbulence is so frightening precisely because it breaks this illusion; once a plane starts darting or shaking, it becomes quite apparent how fast you are moving, like on a rickety roller-coaster. Most turbulence happens in clouds or windy pockets of air that randomly upset the air pressure difference above and below the wings. Lately, however, pilots have seen an increase in clear air turbulence (CAT), harder-to-detect pressure changes occurring in calm skies that can lead to in-flight injuries if crew and passengers are caught off guard. Scientists believe CAT is caused by gravity waves formed when air bounces between mountaintops and the stratosphere, creating rippling waves that “break” against airplane wings. Naturally, recent models suggest climate change could increase the incidence and intensity of such CAT. Engineers have developed ultraviolet lasers able to detect fluctuations in air density up to nine miles in front of a plane, so at least in our future of constant turbulence, the pilot will be able to warn us with the seatbelt light.
Not that long ago, all that turbulence was a legitimate cause for concern, especially for the 40 percent of Americans who report some fear of flying. But maybe the toddler on my flight was so calm because she knew she had been born into a golden era in American air travel safety. Andy Pasztor writes in the Wall Street Journal:
In 1996, before the safety reboot began, U.S. carriers had a fatal accident rate of roughly one crash for every two million departures. That year alone, more than 350 people died in domestic airline accidents, including 230 in the infamous fuel-tank explosion on TWA Flight 800 that sucked scores of passengers out of the fractured fuselage. Within 10 years, the fatal accident rate had been reduced by more than 80%. Today’s travelers are benefiting from another decade-plus of improved safety for U.S. carriers, and the fatality rate has been driven down to one for every 120 million departures.
While better technology – in engines, flight systems, training, and traffic control – has reduced fatal accidents worldwide, other developed countries have lagged behind the remarkable American example. The explanation, says Pasztor, was unprecedented cooperation between regulators, industry bigwigs, and pilots/union-leaders to share flight data and, most importantly and controversially, voluntarily report errors.
“It was an incredible breakthrough,” according to Ray Valeika, former head of engineering and maintenance at Delta. “We actually patted people on the back” for divulging mistakes.
Voluntary reporting identified common, avoidable mistakes that spurred industry-initiated improvements (instead of forcible government regulation), and the result was a nearly miraculous safety overhaul. I think of the tech behemoths, who have so far appeared categorically unwilling to place their customer’s safety over their firm’s profits. Cutthroat monopolistic business practices and exploiting children’s neurochemistry may not be as obviously harmful as airplane crashes, but they’re far more common. Instead of tech industry-regulator teamwork, we have this:
In the 1980s, linguist and anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath wanted to study Americans’ reading habits; the trouble was finding people actually reading. Her solution was haunting so-called “enforced transition zones” –
[P]laces where people are held captive without recourse to television or other comforting pursuits. – Jonathan Franzen, “Perchance to Dream,” Harper’s 1996
Airports and airplanes turned out to be some of the last places where people could reliably be found reading. Heath’s hypothesis has been reinforced in the current age, where subways and plane rides are some of the very few places without cell service or reliable WiFi. Just as flight is singular as a form of transit, so too is the strange phenomenology of flying, one reason fiction writers are airplane enthusiasts alongside physicists. Don DeLillo begins not one but two of his novels midflight. From Players (1977):
The lights inside the aircraft go dim. In the piano bar everyone is momentarily still. It’s as though they’re realizing for the first time how many systems of mechanical and electric components, what exact management of stresses, power units, consolidated thrust and energy it has taken to reduce their sensation of flight to this rudimentary tremble… With the configuration thus upset, the piano silent, the film ignored, there is a sense of feelings turning inward. They remember they are on a plane, travelers. Their true lives below, even now beginning to reassemble themselves, calling this very flesh out of the air, in mail waiting to be opened, in telephones ringing and paperwork on office desks, in the chance utterance of a name.
DeLillo’s waxing narration mimics the bleary-eyed clarity of flying at odd hours or to unfamiliar destinations. It may just be the dry air or the noise-canceling headphones, but on certain flights I can feel myself entering a sort of half-conscious fugue state, suspended in motion. Even in 1977, DeLillo’s airplane scene features passengers lost in a silent movie, but today, airplanes are a menagerie of media. DeLillo rehashed the topic in the opening pages of The Silence (2020):
He found himself staring up at the nearest of the small screens located just below the overhead bin, words and numbers changing with the progress of the flight. Altitude, air temperature, speed, time of arrival. He wanted to sleep but kept on looking… Here, in the air, much of what the couple said to each other seemed to be a function of some automated process, remarks generated by the nature of airline travel itself… He alone would remember some of it, he thought, middle of the night, in bed, images of sleeping people bundled into airline blankets, looking dead, the tall attendant asking if she could refill his wineglass, flight ending, seatbelt sign going off, the sense of release, passengers standing in the aisles, waiting, attendants at the exit, all their thank-yous and nodding heads, the million-mile smiles.
While DeLillo focused on the cosmic features of air travel – blurred consciousness, crossed signals – other novelists exploit airplanes for their social possibility. Commercial flights are one of the last places where people of different social and economic strata literally rub elbows, ripe for dialogue. Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy also begins on a plane:
On the tarmac at Heathrow the planeful of people waited silently to be taken into the air. The air hostess stood in the aisle and mimed with her props as the recording played. We were strapped into our seats, a field of strangers, in a silence like the silence of a congregation while the liturgy is read… She led us through the possibility of death and disaster, as the priest leads the congregation through the details of purgatory and hell; and no one jumped up to escape while there was still time. Instead we listened or half-listened, thinking about other things, as though some special hardness had been bestowed on us by this coupling of formality with doom.”
Later in the same chapter, Cusk’s narrator slips into DeLillo’s contemplative mode, putting into prose the wonderment of the girl on my flight from Traverse City:
The plane seemed stilled, almost motionless; there was so little interface between inside and outside, so little friction, that it was hard to believe we were moving forward. The electric light, with the absolute darkness outside, made people look very fleshly and real, their detail so unmediated, so impersonal, so infinite.
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Until next month,
Micah