The pilot has abruptly and completely forgotten how to fly, and is desperate to figure out what’s happening to him before anyone else on board notices. “Get me a coffee while you’re stretching your legs, will you, Jim?” he bellows tonelessly as his copilot unbuckles himself. His hands tremble as he stretches them over the sickeningly alien panel of flashing lights and impenetrable signals. Nothing, he thinks to himself. I remember nothing. And with this he must ferry 200 souls across a sterile and unfriendly sky? I’m going to be sick, he thinks to himself, as his stomach becomes a fist. It’s all gone. All of it. Just a stupid, helpless clutch of limbs and heartbeat in a white shirt with buttons on it. He closes his eyes.
Flying has stopped working. All of it. “My God,” navigations experts announce to one another over their whizzing, beeping consoles, “of course flying doesn’t work. Lift, propulsion, “aerodynamics”…What absurd fictions. None of it makes any sense. None of it. A machine, heavier than air, carrying people – carrying cargo – taking to the air just because it rushes along very quickly and we strapped wings to it? How could we ever have been so blind?” The delusion collapses instantly.
The computers aren’t down and the plane wasn’t scheduled for maintenance. You’re a fool, stumbling off of the ground that bore and nurtures you, flying sightless and sick and alone. You have nothing. You are nothing. What separates you from the earth? Nothing. The sky wants nothing to do with you. It will not hold you up when you fall.
The flight attendants refused to board in the first leg of the flight. “You want us,” they said in carefully controlled voices, “to walk into a plastic cylinder and check bags and serve drinks in the sky? With nothing strapped to us if something goes wrong? To leave behind our homes and loved ones, suspended in a single-aisled shuttle? For what? A little money? A little money?”
Something shuddered during the last bout of turbulence, and it was important, and it shouldn’t have shuddered. They’re trying to fix it, but they’re also tired and at the end of a long shift and prone to human error, and they can’t promise you it won’t shudder again.
The plane is just gone. Maybe it never was, maybe it disappeared, but whatever it was then, it’s certainly gone now. The gate attendants are polite but vague. “It happens sometimes,” they offer, without clarifying what “it” means, exactly. “You’ll have to make alternate arrangements.”
It crashed, but no one will admit it. No reason, either. Just fell right out of the sky, a hollow, pitching room filled with screams, and then it hit the ground. They won’t tell you, but it happened. They’ll try to trick you into getting on another plane, saying it’s the same as the old one, but you’ll know the difference.
Reading this in the airport, torn between the LOLZ and the nightmares. Or rather, living terrors that await at the end of this long jetway. Flying is the worst. Especially when you are being polite and chat to a flight attendant and/or pilot and realize that they all make such little money many of them have side jobs. Like real estate. Would you want your real estate agent shuttling you at 30,000 feet through time and space? I don’t know. I just don’t know.
The pilots hadnt finished watching Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole?
i am flying today, why are you doing this??
(my hollow plastic flight cylinder will be fine, it will be just fine, thank you)
I WAS ALSO FLYING
of course you were flying. the rest of the time we can ignore the sounds of the planes overhead and pretend they’re all going to land where they’re supposed to and when the door opens the people will all still be inside. it’s only at the airport that you remember that none of it makes sense.
I hate flying.
A former boss of mine and I were once taking a post-lunch stroll outside an office building in the VA suburbs of D.C., right near Dulles Airport. At one point, a huge 747 took off, creating a huge racket. He looked at the lumbering plane, looked at me, looked back at the sky, and said, “It’ll never work.”
You’re already dead. The plane isn’t real. You will spend the rest of your afterlife wandering the airport, forever smelling Cinnabon but never able to find it.
Just keep in mind, if you find yourself in a situation where YOU are 45 minutes delayed at an airport, there can be only one explanation: Langoliers.
Haha, I read that as “lavalieres” and I was like “Why would necklaces cause a delay?”
SHOOTING STARS ONLY
It’s L’Envoi, darling.
Why won’t these matches light? Why is my seltzer flat?
What is that strange sound, like radio static approaching?
More terrifying than anything A+++ answer.
However many times I fly, every time we start hurtling down the runway, I just keep thinking, “What a terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible idea.”
I have some of the same thought process when I get on a ferry. “There’s no way this should work. How are we staying up? The minute we leave the dock we’re going to sink, because we’re on a giant heavy thing.”
I used to be an airline pilot. I still have the same thoughts on takeoff–“This’ll never fly.”
I used to be a flight instructor. I hated pretending that I actually understood how this shit works. People PAID me to lie to them. The worst was teaching wives whose husbands owned their own planes how to land the plane if Hubby suddenly slumped over the controls. What a JOKE.
Langoliers indeed.
Pretty glad this was posted AFTER my two flights this weekend.
Jesus Christ, Mallory.
I feel like this should be a tag for 90% of the things Mallory writes.
I said it because it hadn’t yet been said, and needed to be said….
Prollly needs to be said few times tbh
Every single one of these has happened to me. In the last year.
I SHOULD be terrified but all I can think of is the dream sequence from A Wish for Wings That Work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3emUZ64OeY (the first two minutes of that video)
…or is it just my family that watches a homemade VHS recording of this movie WITH the original early 90’s commercials every Christmas like a ritual?
I was on a plane on the runway when that major power outage took down the DC air traffic control recently. Happened like 10 minutes before our scheduled take off. All east coast flights were grounded. I am already a nervous flier and spent 3 days talking myself down with all the meditative practices I know, so when we sat on that runway for an hour and a half waiting for a new route + eventually had to go back and refuel because said route was longer, I thought long and hard about ever getting on a plane again and why did I want to go on this trip and WHY wasn’t I happy just staying home forever?
perfect weather HERE, of course, but weather in Chicago* is another story.
* it’s always Chicago
mallory you forgot the reason MY last flight was delayed
(it was lice)
D:
D:
D: D: D: D: D: D: D:
YEAH.
At least they gave us a new plane?
oh my god no.
That’s worse than all of the reasons she listed.
I like how the discovery that planes can’t fly only delays your flight by 45 minutes.
His hands tremble as he stretches them over the sickeningly alien panel of flashing lights and impenetrable signals.
No joke, I sometimes get these minor spells of jamais vu, and usually it’s very minor-league, on the order of “wow has anyone realized what a weird word ‘lapse’ is, just look at it FFS”, but every now and then I wonder, what would happen if I’m in heavy traffic–say, a Chicago expressway–and I just, you know, suddenly couldn’t remember how to drive? I mean, my hands and feet are all supposed to be doing different things? At the same time, and with flawless coordination? What the fuck am I, a drummer?
Also, since someone has mentioned “The Langoliers” already, he also has a short story, “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French”, that’s relevant to the topic.
NO NO NO I need to un-read this. I just finally got my license after carefully working through three decades’ worth of severe anxiety and telling myself I’m not going to have a panic attack in the middle of driving and now you put this in my brain. NO.
Sorry, seriously sorry! For what it’s worth, I used to have serious anxiety WRT driving, in no small part because my legal guardian, rather than taking me out for driving practice like every other high school kid, told me that he didn’t trust me behind the wheel of a car–it wasn’t until I was 22 and had to learn for a job that I finally got my license, and much later that I found out that my guardian, for whatever reason, didn’t get his license until he was 25. (We get along much better now, but he had a lot of issues left over from his childhood to work through.)
It’s ok, I’ll cope. I’ll add it to my laundry-list of things to mindfully and serenely meditate on.
Sorry to hear about your crappy early experiences – like, of course he wouldn’t trust a new driver behind the wheel of a car, that’s kind of the whole point of taking you out and helping you learn?? For me it was actually my first driving instructor that completely scared me off the idea. He made a point of telling the class in great detail about all the horrible things that could happen, I guess in order to scare us into being safe drivers. However, I was already scared, so it made me positively neurotic.
It’s okay, driving is a procedural memory (just like anything you do with your muscles) while naming things is an episodic memory. They’re handled and stored COMPLETELY different in the brain. That sense of familiarity, remembering what something is called, can be a bit wonky at times, but procedural memories are much more hardy. In fact, people with amnesia can forget the names of literally everything and still be able to perform their procedural memories correctly! You will not forget how to drive, everything will be okay because science 🙂
This should be posted at airport bars to boost sales.
I’m reading this while on a break at work. As an airline mechanic. I don’t think I could possibly love this more.
Stay right here. Tell us comforting stories about how good you are at your job.
Haha- truth be told, that stuff they say about flying being incredibly safe really is true. There are so many safeguards in place it’s mindboggling. There’s a joke in the industry that an airplane isn’t allowed to fly until the weight of the paperwork associated with the plane equals that of the plane itself; that being said, I’ve seen things that make me glad for those safeguards and regulations.
Things can always go wrong; but most times, when they do, the backups and failsafes work so smoothly that you’d never know the difference. 45-minute delay, like in Mallory’s title? Dealt with one this morning. Standby power inverter relay got stuck closed when the engines were shut down last night, so when they powered up the plane they got a warning message light. We reset the circuit breaker, tested the system, then test-ran the engine and shutdown procedure for good measure. Bada bing, bada boom… easy fix, but between the test procedure and paperwork, a 45 minute delay. The other day it was a motorized cargo loading system, and while I filled out the paperwork, the baggage handlers had to bring another person over to pass the bags back into the hold one by one. Everything on an airplane, even items not essential to flight like tray tables and ashtrays, are part of the airframe, so require documentation, and either repair or a documented deferral. Most of the time, if your delay is only 45 minutes, the problem was pretty minor and either easily fixed or non-essential and deferred until the next opportunity to put the plane in the hangar for a longer term. More major problems will require fixing before dispatch, and the replacement part might need to be brought in from some other station. At that point you’re probably looking at a couple hours. Anything bigger than that, and they’ll either cancel the flight or swap aircraft.
MALLORY.
I have a trans-Atlantic flight on Thursday which I was FINE, TOTALLY FINE about.
Now I may end up pulling a Pope and kissing the tarmac at Logan.
If anyone looks at me funny I will tell them it’s an Irish thing and that it may have to do with the Kennedys.
Or that it’s a reverse Blarney stone, sucking up all my casual profanity and storing it away somewhere safe so it doesn’t leak out my mouth and shame me in non-Irish company.
…and I’m the one that is designated cheerleader for the anxious flyer in our group….
I see what you’re trying to do there, serendipiditous sidebar ad for WestJet Vacations.
Does this have anything to do with that plane that flew across the freaking Pacific Ocean last month when it wasn’t supposed to? How do you just fly the wrong plane across the sea??
Like yeah, I almost got into the wrong car once, but A FUCKING PLANE?
Someone in the flight dispatch and scheduling department is probably having a very bad day right now.
The pilot has switched bodies for the day with her teenage daughter, who has always thought she could totally fly a plane, what’s the big deal, it’s like driving a car only in three dimensions and anyway if you do choke the copilot is right there, and who is now reconsidering that stance.
Do… do you drive your car in two dimensions???
Flying this Thursday. NOT SCARED AT ALL.
But hey, these are better explanations than the one Southwest gave me when a plane coming from LA to Oakland was delayed for like 2 hours. The explanation boils down to “it got a bit chilly in LA and everyone was scared.”
I was once on a flight that was delayed because they’d lost the flight plan. It did not inspire confidence.
It’s the same with you lot. You airists. Yeah, that’s what you are. Just cause you can’t see me, you think it’s all light and ethereal, and, well, ‘airy’.
Well fuck you. I’m the atmosphere, all 5000 teratonnes of it, and I’ll lift up whatever I damm well please.
You little creatures in your skinny little miserytubes *should* be fearful…
I vividly remember when they explained airplane flight to us in elementary school science class. The whole thing boils down to the airfoil, which (allegedly) works because there are fewer air molecules rushing past the top of the wing than the bottom. I was aghast and gobsmacked; how the hell could that ever work? Now Mallory has provided the answer: it doesn’t, of course.
Reasons Your Luggage Is The Last To Appear On The Conveyer Belt:
One of those TSA contraband-sniffing robots identified it as carrying drugs or a bomb or something, so they opened it up, but it turned out to be a false positive. However, as a result of all this, your name is now on a government no-fly list and the next time you try to book a flight you will be detained and interrogated.
It’s not your luggage. Everything inside, every item, has been quickly and carefully replaced with duplicates that are almost identical to the originals, but not perfectly so. You’ll notice, but be unable to put your finger on what’s different, so you’ll chalk it up to nerves and never mention it to anyone. You’ll doubt your own perceptions. Paranoia will gnaw at you. You’ll never know what’s going on.
The luggage crew has been rummaging through your stuff, judging you. They’ve been wearing your clothes and performing little skits, giving their impression of what they think you’re like in harshly mocking voices, then collapsing in uproarious laughter.
The universe hates you.
Your luggage was actually first to appear, but you hadn’t gotten there yet. Instead, some business man who wasn’t paying attention took it, because it looked very vaguely like his. He is not answering his phone. Tonight he will get to his hotel room, open ‘his’ suitcase, find it crammed full of yarn and fabric, and call the airline in a panic. They will courier it to you, just in time for you to begin the next leg of your journey.
I want to print this out and give it to people who give me the old “riding in a car is so much more dangerous than flying in a plane” statistic. You may have a successful flight, you may be on that plane from The Twilight Zone that travels back in time. 50/50 shot.
Snakes.
TRUE FACT: My flight was once delayed for an hour despite perfect weather because a passenger on the previous flight on that aircraft had literally ripped out the toilet and they needed to install a replacement. (Bruce Banner should never fly coach.)
So I got to sit and wait and notice that my fellow passengers included a tattooed convict with a shaved head escorted by two marshals.
(My flight turned out to be very uneventful.)
This is an excellent story.
Two of the books I’ve read this month are Judy Blume’s In the Unlikely Event and Margo Rabb’s Kissing in America, both of which feature teen girls trying to figure out how to get through life in the aftermath of plane crashes in their worlds.
And then this.
And then booking my son a flight for next month.
Yay, air travel!
It’s American Airlines and you didn’t pay the “On-time Flight” fee.
Aw, Mallory! I’m sorry for your flight anxiety.
I actually feel similarly to this about driving, despite how I do it every day and have not yet been in a serious accident. I find it easier to trust pilots than myself.
Um, I'm late to this, but I get the same thing with stairs. Sometimes, I'll be hurrying up or down some stairs and then suddenly, my whole body is going "how does this work again?"
I then have to tell myself really firmly not to think about it and let my legs and arms do their thing. Co-ordination – it's a challenge!
God, you’ve just reminded me of the countless hours I’ve spent staring at my knees in airports.
(*snort*) With me, it’s when I walk to my gate through oh-so-familiar terminals (JFK, LaGuardia, Newark, Detroit, Cleveland) and have those memories: “Didn’t I spend two hours at THAT gate while we waited out the lightning storm? THAT’S the gate where the guy next to me clipped his toenails during our delay. THERE’S the gate where I watched the Pistons on the big screen when I missed my flight and had a six-hour layover….”
i haven’t flown in 18 years and yet this is horrifying on a profound level
Sorry, seriously sorry! For what it's worth, I used to have serious anxiety WRT driving, in no small part because my legal guardian, rather than taking me out for driving practice like every other high school kid, told me that he didn't trust me behind the wheel of a car–it wasn't until I was 22 and had to learn for a job that I finally got my license, and much later that I found out that my guardian, for whatever reason, didn't get his license until he was 25. (We get along much better now, but he had a lot of issues left over from his childhood to work through.)
It's ok, I'll cope. I'll add it to my laundry-list of things to mindfully and serenely meditate on.
Sorry to hear about your crappy early experiences – like, of course he wouldn't trust a new driver behind the wheel of a car, that's kind of the whole point of taking you out and helping you learn?? For me it was actually my first driving instructor that completely scared me off the idea. He made a point of telling the class in great detail about all the horrible things that could happen, I guess in order to scare us into being safe drivers. However, I was already scared, so it made me positively neurotic.