Taking Flight

Welcome to World Hum’s blog focused on all things related to air travel. Here I’ll be chronicling the ups and downs of flying in today’s skies.

I’ll confess to a love of flying. It’s a fascinating combination of adventure and boredom, of leaving the earth and coming back, of departure and arrival. My grandfather flew DC-3s for the now-defunct Eastern Air Lines, and whether there’s a genetic component to my love of air travel or not, I don’t know. But I do love it. (Make no mistake—there is plenty that I, like every air traveler, occasionally find pretty miserable about flying, too.)

Perhaps what I enjoy most about air travel are the contrasts that movement and the resulting change of geography can reveal. Last week I flew from São Paulo, Brazil, back to my home in New York City. The afternoon before my night flight I sat by an open window, enjoying the last moments of warm, tropical air. At the pizza restaurant across the street, two waiters in white shirts and black aprons stood outside, killing time. One lit a cigarette. Birds—swallows, I think—swooped in the sky outside. Later, on the runway at São Paulo-Guarulhos International Airport, a powerful thunderstorm engulfed the airport and the pilot announced that they were delaying the departure until the weather improved. Fine with me. Finally, nine hours later, we touched down on a cold and clear New York City morning, and some time later, our taxi sat motionless on the Triborough Bridge, pulled over by the police: the driver hadn’t been signaling, the cop said.

That captures what for me is essential about air travel: motion and what it can reveal of different places in the world. This is a theme that Barry Lopez explored in his excellent piece “Flight,” which was first published in Harpers in 1995 and later anthologized in his book “About this Life.” I take it to be a kind of foundational text when it comes to exploring both the logistical and poetic sides of air travel. Lopez took more than 40 flights on 747 cargo planes to explore the global air freight industry, but he also ruminates on the feeling of skipping from location to location by plane, of the changing sense of place and time as you travel by air across the world. I’ll be touching on this theme—among many others—from time to time here.

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