November 14, 1999 Danger in the Sky Eighteen tons of steel. Engines powerful enough to suck in and dismember a large flock of geese. Rudders. Flaps. Wings. (don't fool yourselves....the wings don't flap...the flaps do something mysteriously altogether different). Landing gear. Throttles. Fuel tanks big enough to hold enough liquid death to power a small city for a week. All of this, plus two hundredish people who know nothing of aviation, and a small handful of crew that pretend to know at least something about aviation, soar into our skies from thousands of airports, airfields and airstrips in thousands of cities, towns and farm back-forties, thousands of times each and every day. And they tell us to not be afraid. Yeah, whatever. The very fact that these unimaginably weighty beasts can even become airborn is enough to scare a few years off of my life. It's unnatural I tell you, it defies the laws of physics which I don't profess to know anything about except to say that each and every time I've conducted the experiment that involves propelling ANYTHING skyward, the results have been the same: "what goes up, always, always, always comes down....and it never comes down gently....it almost always crashes to the earth". Obvious exception, that one time I snuck into Gramma's bedroom,stole her pillow, ripped it open and tossed the entire thing up into an oak tree in her back yard. The pillow case caught on a branch and, as far as I know, it's still there today. The feathers, naturally, all came fluttering down, and I don't believe a single one of them actually crashed. Gramma never realized that her missing pillow had anything to do with the unusual defeathering of a passing flock of ducks that I described in detail to her that afternoon. But I know I weigh more than a feather, and I'm pretty sure a jet airplane does too, so that little experiment has no validity when it comes to a sky littered with thousands of objects zinging around at break-neck speeds without so much as a traffic light or stop sign to control the mayhem. Oh sure, they have this little thing called a control tower. Yeah, I trust a sleepy, overworked, underpaid government employee two hundred miles away who's trying to make time with the lady who comes around at 11:00 each night to empty trash cans and dust off the radar screens to make sure MY plane doesn't meet with any number of OTHER planes in a flaming mid-air rendezvous. I think I'd rather sit in the cockpit myself and do a little back-seat driving. "Um, Captain? What's that over there? Is that another plane? Veer left, veer left, VEER LEFT!!!!!!!" I've seen enough "Airport" movies to know that the friendly skies aren't as friendly as they say. And you know what really scares me? The movies, or at least a large percentage of them, are based on true stories. Crashes, collisions, explosions, fuselages mysteriously breaking in half....it's a long list that easily fuels at least 30% of my nightmares. And then there's that whole other thing. The thing we really don't like to talk about for fear of putting ideas into minds that have nothing better to do that wait around for ideas to be planted in them. Hijacking. shhhhhhhh......it's like a dirty word. But hey, it happens. And not just occassionally, I might add. I doubt a year has gone by that there hasn't been one. Bad guys from some other land far, far away, who are hell bent on freeing some other bad guys that are being held prisoner in yet another far, far away land. They have guns, too. And they're willing to use them. And what if they actually get their way before the entire passenger list and crew are eliminated? We all end up in a land far, far away full of bad guys. And all I wanted to do was fly home for Christmas. Okay, let's leave the imminent threat of instant demise for just a moment and consider the countless other ways the airlines try to do us in. One word. Food. Or at least the airlines' version of food. I've spent some considerable time attempting to fathom just how a piping hot meal can make it from a gourmet kitchen somewhere in the land of fine dining to my drop-down plastic seat-tray in no less than 15 minutes. Well, silly, it CAN'T. These meals are tossed together in a sweat-shop kitchen in an airport terminal. Yes indeed, kitchens located adjacent to tarmacks rich in fuel vapours are pumping out your mile high meals the world over. If we can see our way clear of panic attacks revolving around plummeting to the earth, and if we can pack enough pepto-bismal and Zantac in our carry-on baggage, then we may just be well on our way to a pleasant flight. But before you get all comfy in this dillusional stupour, you must first attempt to find solace with insanely long check-in line-ups headed up by cranky check-in people, rediculous baggage restrictions, unknown weather patterns, cancelled flights, delayed flights, rerouted flights, lost luggage, airports organized like Skinner boxes, security checks that stop barely short of making you bare your shorts, the zombie-like phenomenon that makes every cross-border traveller visit the duty-free shop, the possible embarassment of having your suitcase opened and shamelessly rifled through in front of hundreds of strangers, the usurious prices of drinks in airport bars, the uppity glances of those "frequent flyers" as they saunter into the private lounges designed just for those men and women that travel around the world and back on the corporate dime.....whew. But like lemmings, we congregate in these densely populated establishments, stand in the lines, wait in the waiting rooms, weep as our luggage disappears into a vast cavern in a wall only to rejoice as it is spit out of a similar cavern thousands of miles away, board the beasts of the skies, white-knuckle our ways across oceans, and all the while thinking about how we will be eating Kraft dinner for the next six months while we attempt to pay for the priviledge of doing it all. It's a darn good thing that these planes take us to warm, tropical places, or reunite us with family and friends, or make it possible to cinch that all-important sale that will rocket us into a corporate stratosphere. Otherwise, I would really have to wonder about us all. Home Back Ahead