Can Microjets Save Us From Being Alone?
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 07.24.06 | 7:45 AM ET
Walter Kirn has some serious issues with modern air travel. “A passenger on a great commercial airline is like the subject of a tyrant who rules through humiliation and conflict,” he writes in an interesting essay called Flying Alone in Sunday’s New York Times magazine. “Resources are kept perpetually scarce, while the procedures for obtaining them (achieving ‘platinum status,’ for example) are kept infernally confusing. Even the architecture of airliners seems designed to encourage sullen withdrawal. The seats not only don’t face each other; they recline in the fashion of falling dominos, creating a chain reaction of resentment every time someone up front decides to stretch. And the windows aren’t windows. They’re demoralizing peepholes, reminding the flier that there’s a world out there from which he is, for the moment, wholly cut off.” Kirn makes his points in the context of arguing that modern air travel has become socially isolating and that “a sense of debilitating entrapment” pervades. I don’t completely agree with his characterization—the thrill of travel still outweighs my sense of isolation and entrapment—but I think he makes some interesting points.
For example, he recalls a recent train trip as a model for what air travel could be.
The platform bustled, but it didn’t frustrate, because there were porters to help us with our bags and plenty of patient fellow passengers who knew that there was space for all of our luggage and who helped my young children loft their knapsacks into prime positions on the racks. A few hours after departing, in the dining car, we ate dessert next to one of these Samaritans. He belonged to a party of German tourists who, when the meal was over, broke out in song. I’m not even sure if singing is legal on airplanes, but since no one I’ve ever encountered on a plane appeared to be in any mood to sing, it’s impossible for me to know.
His main hope for returning air travel to its former mix-and-mingle glory? Microjets. He writes:
Microjets typically carry six to eight passengers, cost less to produce than ordinary private jets and can land on shorter runways than normal airliners. In theory this means that such planes can skip the hubs and fly point to point between much smaller airports. What’s more, fleets of “air taxis” promise to do this relatively economically, allowing people who don’t have corporate jets to travel, at least on occasion, as if they do. Should the industry grow as rapidly as expected (the F.A.A. expects that by 2010 there will be more than a thousand microjets in service), the C.E.O.‘s and film stars in their Gulfstreams may still beat the rest of us to the landing strips, but not by quite as much and not in such superior mental condition.
The ease and convenience of this system is not what I most look forward to, however. What excites me about the advent of the air taxis is the potential that they hold out for a new age of winged camaraderie—the sort of relaxed, companionable travel culture that often exists on the seas and on the rails but has never, in my time, flourished in the air, where speed is all and people are so much ballast.
It’s all interesting stuff, but I suppose not really too surprising from the man who wrote Up in the Air. The first lines of that novel: “To know me you have to fly with me. Sit down. I’m the aisle, you’re the window—trapped.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
Mae 07.24.06 | 12:03 PM ET
I have been on airplanes where groups of passengers decided to sing (unlike the quoted author). Since these passengers—whose seats were widely spaced among other innocent passengers—were already engaging in shouting, flash photography, and additional antisocial group behaviors, I wouldn’t say anything positive about singing…