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What Helps You Get Through a Commercial Airline Flight?
I’m on a cross country flight. It’s tight quarters with some pretty big guys. Some are truly professional flyers. Others jump on Southwest airlines and either complain about everything or gum up the works in the Lord of the Flies self-seating challenge. All of us, 150 plus, are on a five-and-a-half hour flight to Las Vegas. And, no, I don’t like it.
I’ve taken this flight out about 25 times. Thank God, I’ve taken about 25 flights home. I’ve never liked it. That’s not to say I haven’t liked it more on some flights and less on others. It’s just that flying 500 mph inside a hollow metal tube, 35,000 feet above sea level (like it matters if it’s above the water), isn’t my preferred mode of travel. Transporter, pneumatic tube, maybe.
Sometimes the weather is bad, but the flight is smooth. Sometimes, the weather is poor at takeoff, but within five minutes, you look out the window and you’ve been inserted into a United Airlines commercial from the 90s: blue skies, setting sun, and an attractive flight attendant taking care of your every need.
I would rather be inserted into a Star Trek Zero G chamber or some other contraption–something where you don’t sense every last bump and yip that you inevitably feel when a wonderfully- engineered, 50-ton piece of metal and electronics (and don’t forget the flammable fuel in both wings) launches itself into the lower troposphere.
In other words, I need to medicate before I travel. Most of the time, the medicine has a first name: Jack, Jim, Tito. It helps, but I’m never intoxicated enough to forget I’m 35 thousand feet above the earth, my life in the hands of a pilot I’ve never met.
And as much as I enjoy a nice Jack & Diet Coke, and no matter how much I like to pray, it’s a battle each time I walk down the poorly carpeted jet-way and through the door, greet the preternaturally optimistic flight attendant, and sneak a peek into the cockpit, hoping to see a clear-eyed soul with a cross on his collar, greeting me with, “Don’t worry, Buddy, I love my wife and four children like nobody’s business, and I’m scheduled to go on vacation tomorrow.”
I think I’ve flown about a million miles. I like airports. Specifically, I like airport bars. I think it’s pretty cool to be carded at age 50. I like the beefy, retired New York city cop manning the Las Vegas C Terminal sports bar asking me if I want a five dollar shot to go with the eight dollar Bud Light (I save that for my third beer). I like watching ESPN without the sound and closed captions. I wonder what the heck Skip Bayliss just said to Stephen A. Smith. I like meeting the nice couple who flew out to watch the grand kids because their daughter and son-in-law went on a cruise.
I like the crab cake omelet in Obrycki’s in the BWI B terminal. I like empty back rows on a smooth Southwest flight from Las Vegas, as the sun sets. For some reason, I like country music better as I fly over fly-over country.
So, Ricochet folks, is there anything you like about airports, airlines, and long distance travel?
Published in General
Just had a 12 hour flight from Washington Dulles to Kuwait City Monday in coach on United with a fairly large guy in the middle and I’m no light weight either in the window seat. 2 mg of Ativan and I woke up just in time for breakfast and to clear my head for landing. Like it never happened….
1. Put everything you buy on an American Aadvantage credit card, then upgrade to business class. AA supplied the Bose noise-cancelling headphones. I prefer the over-the-ear ones, which really shut down the noise during take-off and turbulence.
2. I use http://www.seatguru.com during seat selection. An aisle man, on American’s spiffy new Airbus A321 (32B) Transcon, I enjoyed seat 6C. Excellent leg room, just a quick step to the head, and tilted inward so no gusts of rest room air.
3, Bring your own audio on those Apple devices. Despite a rich selection of movies, the AAirline-provided music offerings were atrocious.
4. Don’t forget to check the entertainment offerings, especially if there are movies on demand. Our recent round trips on American had American Sniper, Red Army (Cold War hockey documentary), and The Judge with Duvall, Downey Jr., and Vera Farmiga. Start your movie early in your flight, or lose the ending.
6. Travel expert Peter Greenberg says there are two kinds of luggage, carry-on and lost. Pack Smart and Carry On.
I also suggest tanking up on water early in the flight. The flight attendants are usually very good about filling your glass or helping you stockpile bottled water. Dehydration is a common problem during flight, and is exacerbated by alcohol.
See, when all of you who LOVE airplane travel have to share all your little tips and tricks for enjoying the experience, you’re really demonstrating how annoying it is. If it was an authentically great experience, you wouldn’t need tips and tricks. It would be enjoyable on its own.
I like getting on a plane with too little sleep. I have fallen asleep in my seat before the plane leaves the gate.
I dehydrate myself on purpose so I don’t have to use the bathroom.
I don’t how you can sleep on a plane. I don’t trust anyone enough.
“I am a very lucky man.”
But does that come with free baggage checking?
Great. Now I’m having a retroactive panic attack over the last 30 years of sleeping next to strangers in the skies . . .
I’m an extremely bad flier. I’ve gotten airsick before the plane left the gate. (OK, it was second flight, but there still had been an hour layover.)
I hate flying too. And I got my pilot’s certificate too. There are two reasons I haven’t flown since 2003:
1. Insane security procedures, and
2. Heavy reliance on computers, including fly-by-wire.
Number one is self-explanatory, number two needs more.
One of the ten rules of engineering is the following:
#8. Software is not bound by physical laws or constraints.
What this means is that for fly-by-wire planes, there is no hydraulic backup (that I’m aware of). I don’t want to be at the mercy of a jet’s computer that might decide it doesn’t understand the situation, and starts to do weird things with the airplane.
Offering up for the good of my immortal soul.
I know cars are running by computer, didn’t know the small planes were as well. Drat. At least if a car stops you are already on the ground.
I’m hoping to hit a million miles flown on United next year.
It’s true that security can take a minute out, but other than that, there’s very little reason for you to not have an audiobook playing from the moment you leave your house to the moment you greet someone at your destination. Unlike paper books, you don’t have to have hands free to read them, and you don’t need to be stationary.
If reading a book isn’t interesting to you, then I can understand disliking flying. Otherwise, I’ve never understood the objections to routine travel. It’s not like driving, where you actually have to spend the time focused on something other than stuff you’d like to be focused on (learning about the Korean War, the activities of the Number One Ladies Detective Agency, the development of the prefrontal cortex, or whatever floats your boat).
On a long flight I find just throwing a pair of power tool hearing protectors over your regular ear buds is an economical alternative. There’s plenty of space in there so nothing is pressing the buds uncomfortably into your ears.
It may be true that it’s better to have a backup, but if I’m given a choice between a human and a computer, with neither option having the other as a meaningful backup, the only factor that makes a difference to me is which one has the lower error rate. Since my understanding is that the answer is “computer”, I prefer that one.
The chance of a fatal accident (c) = the chance of an accident (a) x the odds of the accident being fatal (b).
Even if your statistic was accurate (which it’s obviously not), saying that stats showing c to be lower are bogus because b is higher ignores the possibility that the difference in b for flying and other methods of transport is smaller than the difference in a. As it turns out, the difference in a is more important and the statistic is not nonsense (although there are other reasons to quibble with it, this isn’t one).
In my teens and 20s I had an intense fear of flying until I decided that 1) death was unlikely and 2) death is inevitable.
Nowadays its like it was when I was a boy: I like the drama of takeoff, the thrill of wind buffeting the craft, poking through the clouds and staring at all the little ant cars below. That is what I like about traveling through the air.
Not the small planes, the big commercial jets.
OTOH, maybe some of the new general aviation aircraft have gone to fly-by-wire too. No need, really.
James, James, James . . . which truly has the lower error rate? I say it’s the live pilot. This day and age, if he does make a mistake, it’s often because a computer-assisted function has gone bad, and the pilot has a hard time trying to figure out how to recover the aircraft, if the software will even let him . . .
I share your distrust for being miles too high in little more than a metal tube. I also share your coping mechanism (I prefer Dewars). What troubles me is how little skepticism you show towards other modes of transportation – mainly, the transporter.
Exhibit Only: Star Trek The Next Generation episode Second Chances. A transporter malfunction splits the beam and creates two William Rikers. Before we believed that the transporter disassembled, sent, and reassembled your atoms. If that were true we would have two half Rikers (Numbers .5) rather than two whole men in different locations. Where did the new matter come from. Clearly, the transporter sends information rather than atoms. The original is destroyed and rebuilt elsewhere from entirely different atoms. That means that Kirk died the first time he ever beamed anywhere and we have been watching facsimile after facsimile score with green chicks. Listen to Bones. He gets it.
Ricochet pods, duh.
The noise canceling headphones are OK, but I rather snug fitting in-ears. Klipsch work well for me. They’re also easier than over-ears for sleeping (at least for me).
I’ve stuck w/ United and the Death Star Alliance, largely because elite status essentially guarantees Economy Plus seating (I’m 6’4″ and 250). We’re treated like dirt, but that just makes United high-milers a tough crowd.
Just ask the [expletives] who hijacked United 93.
This is a big part of enjoying flights for me; trying to appreciate the wonder of what I’m actually experiencing and not letting it became too routine. Appreciating that the vast majority of mankind throughout time has dreamed of looking down on clouds, and I get to do it multiple times a year.
Naturally you can only maintain this sort of awe for really short spurts, so pepper it through the flight with healthy dashes of heroic imaginings; pretending to be on a space flight, about to parachute into war-time France, and tussling with would-be terrorists. I do not make this recommendation tongue-in-cheek.
David, I love your boyish whimsy!
But if you ever sit next to me on a plane, keep it to yourself.
Excellent advice. I travel by air nearly 200,000 miles per year–next week I am off to Tokyo, Osaka, Beijing and Hong Kong–and am an instrument-rated private pilot. My favorite period of business travel was between 2001 and 2006 when I was a partner in a Cirrus SR-22 and for the most part flew myself wherever I needed to go. One big plus was missing out on the worst of post-911 security theater on the commercial side of airports. Alas, all of the intercontinental travel of late makes taking the single-engine Bugsmasher infeasible.
My key recommendations for the airliner:
1) If you fly internationally, enroll in Global Entry. The automated kiosk bypasses the multi-hundred person queue at passport control; a blessing when you are dog-tired and desperately want to get back home. I now routinely dash from jetway to arrivals in under five minutes. And Global Entry automatically enrolls you in TSA Pre-Check, which is the greatest government program of all time. Pre-Check teleports you back to the 1970s from a security screening perspective. And it actually makes much more sense than the ever more elaborate rituals aimed at preventing potentially dangerous objects from getting on an airliner.
2) Never ever check a bag. My carry-on suitcase can sustain me for a weekend, ten days, or the rest of my life. The advantages include no lost bags and the ability to get ahead of the crowd and switch flights the moment the gate agent announces a “brief” delay for a “minor” maintenance issue
3) Bose headphones reduce fatigue and permit me to actually understand what is being said on the inflight movie.
4) Bring a good book–thankfully you can now keep your Kindle powered-up the entire flight. Sometimes business imperatives require logging onto WiFi, but I resist the urge to connect. My airliner seat is the last place where I get to extend my gnat-like attention span–no tweets, emails, or calls.
When I’ve had to fly to/ from Chicago, I hit the Harry Caray’s at Midway on the way home. Great turkey club. Any favorite food or beverage establishments out there? I’ll be in Austin in September.
malwords #55 – I used to look forward to flying through Memphis on Northwest so I could eat at Corky’s or Interstate Barbecue. Best airport food in the US.
Flying commercial in steerage really is awful in every way (although I did just get to fly on an A380 which was kind of cool). But I can’t not travel. Other than doubling or tripling the cost by flying business class (which just seems shockingly wasteful even if I could afford it), what are the options if travel (especially foreign) is a consuming passion?
I’ve lived in Hong Kong for almost 25 years, so I’ve lost track of the number of long-haul itineraries I’ve done to the USA, including many with Daughter Tall, ranging in years from infant to now almost-teen.
We Talls have had some rough flights. For example, defying all common wisdom, Daughter Tall, as a nine-month-old baby on her inaugural airplane trip, a 24-hour, three-flight itinerary we took to my ancestral homeland in Iowa, slept a grand total of one hour. That’s 60 minutes out of 1,440. That’s 4% of the trip. Was I counting? Well, perhaps.
I’ll spare you the details of the next trip we took to the USA, aka ‘The Puke Trip’ . . . .
Oh, and I’m 6’5″, and we always fly coach.
Anyway, I’ve thought about this thread’s topic long and hard. What gets me through? Gratitude, actually. I certainly fail in being grateful when TSA gropes me, or the (United, of course) gate agent assigns us, including a five-year-old Daughter Tall, to the three most totally-separate and widely-spaced seats a commercial jetliner has to offer, or when . . . well, enough.
But I am grateful to live in a world in which I can live on one side of the globe, and travel regularly, at speed, and in safety and relative comfort (a plane’s better than a stagecoach, dear friends) to the other side. As I cringe in my econ seat, I silently thank the Wright brothers, the guys from the Right Stuff, and so on . . .
Now, leaving behind the high-blown rhetoric for a few practical tips: load up the podcasts, iPads and Kindles, and, if you’re flying to Asia, choose Cathay or Singapore Airlines whenever possible. Your flight won’t be perfect, but it may just restore one or two dimmed facets of the once-glittering jewel that was commercial flight.
My keys to successful travel:
I lived and worked in Beijing (commuting from Dallas) for five years, and still travel for work. I always fly as cheaply as possible. If there’s a $1000 difference, I’m more than happy to spend the difference on the ground!
Drew, man, I love ya like a brother, but this is like saying that offering tips and tricks for a great marriage means sex is inherently unpleasant.
I used to hate flying – claustrophobia, loss of control, worries about THAT SOUND, and so on. As with Malwords, I took the edge off at the airport bar, but there’s a point in your life when you’re on an 8 AM flight and thinking “well, a screwdriver has orange juice, and people have orange juice for breakfast,” and you think maybe not, this time.
Now I love it. The noise-canceling headphones, a good book, a window seat to look out at the world unrolling below or the view above the clouds – something unavailable to 99.99999999% of all members of my species who have ever lived – and a TV show on my iPad. It’s a vacation.
I never get tired of takeoff. All that power.
During the time that computerization has been being becoming more widespread, crashes have been becoming rarer. Maybe that’s not due to reduced pilot error, but whatever the reason for the increased safety, it appears to me to represent increased safety.