Air Miles

I write emails to myself on my Droid as an initial draft of ideas for a post. I do it sitting in my recliner with my morning coffee, as I write now, and I've done it on airplane flights.

I had occasion to fly to Sacramento a week or so ago. Each time I fly I get an urge to jot down all the flights I have taken. Maybe staring at the fold-up table embedded in the back of the seat in front of you brings up associations with all the other seat-back tables I have stared at over decades. My flights go back to about 1965 when as a kid, I flew alone on a Ansett-ANA airlines DC-3 between Sydney and Brisbane, and returned on a then ultra-modern Boeing 727. On this my most recent flight, to pass the airborne time between Tucson and Las Vegas, I jotted down a list of airline flights in an email to myself.

The numbers get staggering, both in terms of take-offs and landings, travel time, and distance. Not counting a couple of times my brother Paul took me up in single engine planes, or the one time I went soaring in a glider, or the distances traveled circling around airports on account of weather or waiting for a parking place, I reckon I have been on over two hundred flights for a cumulative distance (as the crow flies) of over fourteen times around the earth's circumference. That works out to 450,000 miles.

The most quaint flights? Clearly on a tail-wheeled DC-3 with wings in flight oscillating all too freely. I had the pleasure of flying in a DC-3 thrice, the second being from Auckland to Wellington in 1966 (Air New Zealand) and the third from Oaxaca to Puerto Escondido in 1982 (Lineas Aereas Oaxaqueñas).

The first time the passengers broke into spontaneous applause upon a landing? Manaus. The flight crews of domestic airlines in Brazil delighted in repeating in-flight announcements in multiple languages: Portuguese, Spanish, French, English and German. That is, until the flight from Rio hit wicked thunderstorms around the mid-Amazon city of Manaus. Then the announcements about a delayed landing, having to circle, and alternate airfields in case of fuel issues came only in Portuguese. It was a long and anxious time rocking about in black clouds looking out the windows and seeing lightning flashes in the sky and nothing but dense jungle below. When the plane finally approached the landing strip, hit ground (it was a rough landing), and settled down, the passengers clapped in relief.

Lots and lots of people have flown much, much more than I have, whether for work or pleasure, so I am not claiming any great achievement. Still, countless lives have been spent in the narrow confines of medieval villages or within a radius of a few blocks in Brooklyn. True, humans accumulated huge distances of travel over the course of lives as hunter-gatherers, seasonal nomads, caravan traders across Asia, seamen sailing the oceans, and flight crews at work and their dependents flying stand-by for free. But I am a regular, only moderately adventuresome person with a sedentary job.

To have traveled by air over fourteen times around the world says a lot about modern times and how small this planet has become. I am just not quite sure what it says, given human inability to understand its own varied cultures or refrain from spoiling its planet, but it surely says something.