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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, October 23, 2009

Fly Me WHERE?!? 

...there has been a certain amount of talk over the last day or so about the circumstances of Northwest flight 188, which on Wednesday night went on an unscheduled tour of northern Wisconsin at 37,000 feet before finally finally wandering back to the southwest to land at its intended destination in Minneapolis. What fascinates me most about this story is the reaction of the passengers...

I am not a frequent flier by any means. The last time someone had the muscle and force of will to stuff me into a narrow fragile aluminum tube so I could hurtle through a hostile, brutally cold and unsustainable environment 6 long miles above Mother Earth's warm loving embrace (that someone being Mrs. Jack K.), there was no such thing as the TSA and it would be 15 years before idea that people would willingly fly airliners into buildings became a grim reality. I have, on the other hand, become something of a personal travel agent and concierge for Mrs. Jack K. and our eldest child, scheduling flights between the eldest's East Coast college and our Orygun Cascades east-slope redoubt, and as a result I understand lots of things about arrival/departure times and the availability of flight-tracking websites like FlightView. I also have certain understanding of what I should see out the window near the end of a flight, even if that flight is in a holding pattern and even if all that is going on at night. What amazes me the most about this story is that nobody (at least none of the interviewed passengers) seemed to even understand that they had flown an extra 300 miles before finally getting on the ground; passengers even seemed to accept the premise that they were circling in a holding pattern when a simple gander out the window would have suggested that such a thing wasn't actually happening...

What we seem to be facing with this story is the perfect manifestation of the Bovination Of The Air Travel Public. That once-glamorous ideal of the jet-setter being whisked across the face of the planet in the capable - and sometimes vaguely erotic - care of an airline that had no greater desire than to make several confining hours in a fragile aluminum tube nothing less than a cultural and gustatory delight is all gone now. Air travelers are now lucky to think of themselves as the favored cows in a Chisholm Trail cattle drive, hoping for nothing better than to finally, someday, arrive at their intended destination with a minimum of human insults or assorted poking, prodding, and strip-searching. There really isn't any other way to explain how the 144 passengers of Northwest flight 188 could unwittingly endure an extra 300 miles of flight before finally arriving at their scheduled destination, only to be surprised by a swarm of law enforcement officers swarming onto the plane when they finally arrived...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:36 PM 0 comments

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