by Jey Sushil

I was trying not to think, or possibly I was not in the mental state to think anymore. It had been 40 hours since I slept, arranging for my sudden flight to India. My…

by Connie Timpson

It wasn’t a matter of scary people with explosives, drugs, or even overspending without reporting. It was a matter of apples. Red ones. Jet lagged, sporting airplane hair, and cranky about Air France’s awful

by Susana H. Case

My husband wants to make a video of me packing a suitcase for YouTube since we fly a lot. I go to my computer and learn that videos of “How to Pack a Suitcase”…

by Hilary Sideris

Out of contact with air traffic control, we sit for hours on the tarmac at Newark, watch The Apprentice. Behind us, a man begs for water. The flight attendant smiles but brings nothing. We…

by Al Scott Pearce Baker

To fly is to forfeit identity. What boards the plane is not what leaves it. In the sky, the self disintegrates. The body persists, but the soul enters eclipse. I have never flown without…

by Barrie Brewer

The flight from Lima to Cusco was like something out of a horror movie. The wheelchair was a dead giveaway. Our son Goose was so weak we had to wheel his limp body from…

by Aisha Piracha

You sit at the edge of your seat in the boarding area, cradling your hand luggage. You see everyone lining up like sardines all rolled up in a tin, but they are actually upright,…

by Marie Soubranne as told to Hyokyung Park

In January of this year, I came to the United States for my exchange semester. My father and I took a plane from Paris to New York. But just before boarding, I realized that…

by Brandon O’Deay as told to Kyla O'Deay

I work for a local Louisiana government as the head of the IT department, and something new is always happening at the office with all the characters I work with. For example, one random…

by Nadir Benslimane

When I attempt to recollect my memories from my journey to France, the memories of Paris pop out vividly: winding streets down to a small corner cafe; the crisp morning air as sunlight parted…

by Tabitha Neaux as told to Max Schweikarth

I didn’t eat anything that day. Hell, I usually never eat before long flights as I have a pretty sensitive stomach. But because I didn’t eat anything, the meal cart that came to my…

by Emani Leefort

Six thirty a.m. at the Louis Armstrong International Airport. Who books a flight for that early in the morning? Answer: a scholarship foundation. Once a year, every year, all scholars go to the Mentoring…

by Vivien Marx

My suitcase is far too plump but it closes and the zipper is strong. Some travelers manage a long trip with two t-shirts, three pieces of underwear, and a toothbrush. That’s not me in…

by Grace Campbell

To compensate for the worst summer of my life, my mother sent me to Los Angeles with my older sister. We drove together and then I flew home alone. I had forgotten to do…

by HyoKyung Park

About a month ago, I took a flight from Korea to San Francisco to start my exchange program in New Orleans. Since there was no direct flight to New Orleans, I decided to spend…

by Claire Mitchell

Most people go through childhood viewing their parents as human adjacent. As a kid I thought my parents never had a human emotion until they drank too much, or when we attended funerals. Really…

by Joelitza E. Arroyo-Ramirez

At 4 a.m. on December 31st, the airport was eerily quiet except for the occasional sound of luggage wheels clicking against the tile floor. I was dragging my suitcase through TSA when my phone…

by Alyx Marroquin

I’m convinced that airplanes, airports, and everything to do with them exist out of time. They are liminal spaces that hold everything transitory, including our memories and feelings. Nothing that happens within ex

by Morgan Matteson

Pilots are traditionally buried in their uniforms, cap in hands. This is something I learned preceding my step-grandfather's funeral. He had been a lifelong career pilot for United Airlines, something that was fated

by Miller Nichols

We had always driven out there. A two-day road trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, was a regular, biannual pilgrimage for me and my family to visit my dad’s parents and siblings. However, this…

by Noah Rozzell

Many people get nervous when traveling. The feeling of impending doom starts to bubble up, and images of lost bags, missed connections, and crashed planes start lodging in one's mind. Fear not, though, there…

by Max Schweikarth

I wouldn’t have been in this situation had I not touched that guitar. Earlier that day I had picked it up from this hidden repair shop off of Oak St. My boyfriend, Ty, bought…

by Damari Esqueda

I remember only two things from the first time I rode in an airplane. One: my mom took two dramamine that knocked her out, a precaution so her eardrums wouldn't pop. And two: the…

by Mae Bennett

I concealed some shame for a very long time for not having left America in my first twenty-two years. (Champagne problems, I know.) When my friends began to study abroad sophomore and junior years,…

by Phoebe Swetish

Supposedly, there is a law stating that every word in the Icelandic language must contain at least one acute accent, indicating an elongated or emphasized vowel. I’m not sure how well this information would…

by Erin Murphy

Model plane, plane delay. Butterfly net, net income. Kite string, string theory. You have a knapsack packed with every reason for whiskey: a woman who loves you for loving her, a boss you call…

by Drew Payne

The airport’s hand soap had only been used to scrub my hands and forearms, just below the elbows, but its cloying scent lingered as if I had bathed in it. I had felt infected…

by Erik Bittner

It’s pinned to the plaster ceiling over my desk, which my wife doesn’t like so much, but I put it there so I could look up and always see it, a little model airplane.…

by Anne Graue

Whenever I fly from New York to Kansas or Cyprus, I know the planes will rise, large chunks of metal will move into the air, first on the ground, then in the sky. Placing…

by Parker Emerson

We arrive at the United Airlines counter at Southern California's Ontario International Airport three hours before the scheduled 10:56 a.m. departure time to check our bags. There are six other people in line, but…

by Jodi Goforth

My first flight instructor was an asshole. His name was Boris, which should tell you enough. His one redeeming act, however, was when he showed me 10,000 feet in a Cessna. The poor contraption…

by Amy Holman

We are flying north, near six o’clock. I’ve got a window seat behind the angled wing. On the open fold table is my tiny cold press notebook the size of a small shower tile.…

by Pavle Radonic

At the terminal and passing the boutiques the adjustment was always needed for the frequent flyers. First-classers even, if not A-listers, might be sprinkled there too. Directly from the street a little shock was…

by Cross McCoy

There is nothing that can soothe the mind-grating experience of standing in a line, served through the system like slop through troughs, then ordered to remove your shoes. You must even place your phone…

by Barrie Cole

I was on a plane once a long time ago, and the woman sitting next to me had never been on a plane before. She was young, perhaps nineteen or so, and she explained…

by Carole Greenfield

There is so much about flying that she loves. When the turbulence dissolves and the plane is flying smoothly again. She's never taken drugs but tells herself this must be what a high feels…

by Pavle Radonic

For a fellow who had missed FOUR internat. flights, 2 ½ hrs early by the gate was A-OK. At the boutiques along the corridors the ice-cold starlets had loomed with bags & watches, calling…

by Elaine Joy Edaya Degale

I purchased last-minute tickets to Cuba. This was my first solo-trip. I started writing this in Miami when I was on a ten-hour layover from my long, and very cheap, journey to Havana. Without…

by Crockett Doob

Sometimes you date your opposite. This is common enough. My parents are opposites. My mom the talker; my dad not. This woman I dated was a lot like my mother, which normally would repel…

by Pavle Radonic

Touch over 35mins on clear, open freeways in Jakarta on a Saturday; as soon as we cleared Thamrin City it was a breeze. As a consequence there would be a 4 hour wait at…

by Emma J. Voigt

My body is being shaken about, but it’s a perfect day. It has to be. With nothing more than a warm breeze, the cloudless sky is safe. I loosen my grip on the yoke,…

by Terry Borst

It’s long been accepted mythology that the classic Byrds' song "Eight Miles High" is about being stoned—maybe about an acid trip or an evening on ‘shrooms. Band members David Crosby (now p

by Scott Knoll

This story takes place sometime in the early 90’s, when the internet was still associated with that horrible dial-up sound and when comic books were still considered socially taboo. My family and I were…

by Eleni Stephanides

At the table next to me inside the airport restaurant, I hear a brother explain what braces are to his younger sister. A blond boy with short legs holds a mug of coffee in…

by Natalie Elward

I have a love-hate relationship with airports. Mostly hate, if I’m being honest. I appreciate the grandeur of being able to travel such great distances, but there is still always an acute form of…

by Sophia Lyons

It was early in the morning and the sky was still asleep. Generally, I had two to three more hours of sleep. It was so early even the birds were asleep. Stretching my legs,…

by Pavle Radonic

Squeezed in the middle. Point of honour not to hog the rests. Window French chap; aisle Indo domestic going back to her kampung for a fortnight. Both uncommunicative. Former had just come out from…

by Scott Saalman

Leveling at 30,000 feet after departing LaGuardia Airport, our jet was jostled. We represented nothing but a tubular chew toy in the jaws of a masticating, mythical sky beast. The plane’s drop was sudden,…

by Gavin Garza

Dad texts me before my flight and asks if the airport brings back memories of Vegas. I lie, and say yes. It’s been ten years since I left the state by plane, two since…

by Rossana G. D’Antonio

My plane was screaming down the runway...or was that me screaming. The little Cessna’s wings wavered and bounced slightly as we gained speed. My heart was pounding, and I stared out the window as…

by Charles J. March III

At the airport, a man sat down to empty his bowels before boarding, and self-consciously questioning whether he should release his initial gas like a gentleman, he instead decided to let it fly, and…

by Judy Chaikin

I usually sit on the aisle, but this flight from Cabo San Lucas to L.A. was sold out, so there I was trapped in a window seat and feeling claustrophobic. I couldn’t help checking…

by Won Lee

Almost missed my flight to Portland. Woke up at 730 in the morning, triple-checked Benjamin's flat for forgotten items, lugged/dragged my much-too-heavy suitcase down an interminable number of steps, exerting my fles

by Joan Potter

In a wooden jewelry box on my bedroom dresser, along with some old beads, a bunch of unmatched earrings, and a broken wristwatch, is a metal coin bearing the raised image of an airplane…

by Nadine Dolby

I hurry towards the gate at JFK. This is a journey I have made many times, and I feel a rush of anticipation and excitement as I begin to hear more and more travelers…

by Gina Forberg

The tray table is in its upright position and the seat belt light screams red and I would like nothing more than to go to the bathroom, but the flight attendant has not given…

by Yvonne Osborne

He was slim and well-dressed with a nice haircut, not too short, not too long. He wore a black tailored jacket and well-made jeans. His black leather shoes showed no sign of the slush…

by Jason Weiss

What could be more peculiar than flying in an airplane? No matter how many hundreds of times we’ve joined the procession to file into that big metal tube, no matter how used to it…

by James Robertovich

I had made sure my coins, masks, wallet, and all were in my backpack, leaving “nothing but air” in my pockets, as the TSA agent commanded. Soon my backpack came out of the scanner,…

by Ellen Beldner

Twelve years ago I swore a blood oath to never again fly British Airways. Do you know what it feels like to have a urinary tract infection? You have a fierce urge to urinate…

by Stephanie R. Pearmain

The first time I boarded a plane to Honolulu, it was a one-way ticket and I cried most of the flight. I’d just turned 15 and while more than once in the recent past…

by Alex Ehrenzeller

Despite my advice, Captain Juanito felt prepared to take a midnight flight. It was dangerous enough just standing in the stockroom. Why my cousin decided to fly his plane in the shelving fortress of…

by Scott Zukowski

I wake in an altered state as we descend from Phoenix into JFK. My cylinders fire, my spindles spin, my cogs turn, but the time surrounding the machine is warped and delayed and advances…

by Sara Barnett

The Great American South, till now, remained a mystery, one that blurredly conjured thickset women in rolled down stockings fanning themselves in the heat on a porch stapled to the earth by wisteria vines…

by Bonnie Boyles

The adolescent seatmate plunked down in the narrow seat next to me on the plane bound for Phoenix. The electronic game was immediately taken from its case and thumbs set in motion to play…

by Suzanne Weerts

I literally missed the train by one croissant from the breakfast buffet stuffed in my purse, one hand heart-directed at my daughter as I went down one escalator and she headed up another toward…

by Crystal Byers

I’m not a frequent flyer. Sometimes I forget the rules. As I approached the security checkpoint at George Bush Intercontinental, I removed all items from my pockets and placed my carry-on items into the…

by Michelle Goering

Propped up in bed with the 1918 Spanish flu, Lydia Burkholder of Nappanee, Indiana, sighed restlessly. An Amish ten-year-old and my eventual grandmother, she longed to go outside. Her fever had broken but her…

by Laura Taylor

The early morning light made long tree shadows below us. I took the card out of the pocket of the seat in front of me. It said we were on a Vickers Viscount twin-engine…

by Margo Stutts Toombs

In the summer of 1974, I performed my final flight attendant duties with an extra bounce in my step, knowing it would be my last time to serve rubbery, chartreuse eggs, mystery meat, and…

by William Stobb

Boarded but stuck in a delay at the gate, I see that one of my ex’s posted a picture of her Bible in sunlight on her old wooden table—some glare on the red plastic…

by Jehan Ramadan

A few years ago I was working at an airline lounge when a mother and her two grown daughters approached me at the front desk. Whoever said good things come in threes had never…

by Jehan Ramadan

I sat next to a woman and her eight-year old daughter on a cross-country flight one day. That's not that long, you may think, but by the time we landed it felt like I…

by Mark Chesnut

Are you a teenage boy who doesn’t quite fit in? Self-conscious about your stringy red hair, pale skin, girlish walk and lackluster reputation at school? Intimidated by the popular kids, the jocks, the bullies…

by Gail Brady

For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated with travel, perhaps a manifestation of my Celtic-Gypsy soul. Even in utero I was transported across the country from Boston to Los Angeles…

by Anthony DeVita

It was a rainy winter night when I made my way toward the back of the Boeing 747. As the line of people before me struggled to stuff their outrageously large roller luggage bags…

by Kay Bontempo

To the Customer Service Department at United Airlines: My sincere apologies for missing my scheduled flight from Chicago to Puerto Vallarta (with layover in Mexico City) on March 8, 2019. This was 100% my…

by Rebecca Evans

I was about to push faster than the speed of sound, something the human body was not designed to endure. Especially mine. Only twenty, I weighed 100 pounds and focused on staying skinny, breastless,…

by Bridget Smith

When you fly on anything smaller than a jet, I have news for you: you are cargo. And as cargo, what you weigh is crucial. In Alaska where I live, small planes rule—and not…

by Anyonita Green

Somewhen between 9/11 and the last global recession, European airlines offered flights at tantalisingly low prices. Every Tuesday, RyanAir, EasyJet and other budget operators would release hundreds of seats on dozens of

by Victoria Houser

When the plane left Terminal C at Ted Stevens International Airport, it traveled over 18 years of silent longing and hidden assault. As we gradually picked up speed, I watched the tarmac lines disappear,…

by George Fotheringham

My nose recoiled as I lowered my head under the airplane door. The air smelt how the interior of the Spirit flight looked, cramped and stale. The front half of the plane was filled…

by Jade Arvizu

It’s going to be different this time. You’ll be ok. Breath. Don’t be afraid! Don’t cry! This is my travel mantra. Internally on repeat, over and over at the onset of every trip to…

by Joseph Sigurdson

I’d been traveling for nine fuckin hours in a suit and tie. The suit and tie was just a facade. I had no money. I pulled nickels out of the couch cushions to afford…

by Holly Hein

We flew off into the most spectacular sunset over the front range with the Denver lights spread out in twinkling patterns below. That winter there was hardly any snow in the Rockies, a clear…

by Gabriel Meek

With flying you rarely know who will be seated next to you until, well, they’re seated next to you. It could be a priest who gives you a dollar for good luck. Or it…

by Stewart Sinclair

Whenever I sit down on a plane, I resign myself to death. It’s the only way I can reconcile my fear of flying with the fact that I have had to do it on…

by Julian Hanna

It's a warm January morning and I'm heading to the airport in an old yellow diesel Mercedes taxi driven by one of my students. I spent the previous day swimming in the sea, which…

by Elizabeth H. Boquet

Newsfeeds tripped across the flat screen in my basement the nights after Katrina slammed ashore, and I found myself a thousand miles away from the place that will always be home, calling my parents…

by Sandra A. Miller

I boarded the plane and settled into 26A, a window seat next to an empty one. And that’s the first time I felt it in my gut—the uncoupling—even more pronounced than at 4:00 that…

by Susan Dillon Tschudi

The winter of 1973 was harsh in the Midwest but that particular January day was especially unforgiving. Delayed by a blinding snowstorm, our beleaguered Dallas-based flight attendant crew finally arrived at our layover h

by Andrew Chinich

I’m not sure when I realized the depth of my love of flying but I got hooked early and it’s lasted a lifetime. In 1941, my father was just barely twenty-two when he found…

by Avery Keatley

I had made a rather serious mistake. A few weeks before my family’s first-ever overseas vacation, when I would be strapped into a Dreamliner for eight hours, I watched Castaway. I didn’t watch it…

by Richard Klin

The Lufthansa flight from Milan, bound ultimately for New York, was crowded and uncomfortable. I needed to switch planes in Frankfurt, which elicited no great reaction on my part. While I preferred direct flights,…

by Sheila Sundar

In the winter of 2009, two days before my son was born, I walked my father the four miles from the door of my Brooklyn apartment, across the Manhattan Bridge, to the pier on…

by Chris Brauer

I love traveling. The more I travel, the more I want to experience the world and meet new people. But I’m not good at traveling. While I like being there, I am terrible at…

by Stirling Noh

I've given up trying to sleep on airplanes. A cat nap here and there? Sure, and they come easily if you drink the way I do. But the whole theatre of pillows and blankets…

by Saanya Ali

An airport. Some see it as a nuisance, I see it as a story. Airports are places of new beginnings and long-awaited ends, arrivals and departures, "once upon a time's" and "happily ever after's

by Melanie J. Mendenhall

My three-year-old wants to fly. Not in an airplane. She’s done that dozens of times, and that’s not at all what she means. She wants to hang in the sky like a butterfly, sail…

by Tomoé Hill

Speak to me of love; I will speak to you of wings. The too-bright rising sun glinting on metal; sharp angles cutting through clouds; the mechanical sounds of a plane beginning its descent above…

by Maryann Aita

In a time before WI-FI on airplanes, my nineteen-year-old self was thrilled to have a nonstop flight from New York to Phoenix to visit my parents. I was looking forward to a five-hour nap.…

by Kathy Doherty

Our family had moved to one of the beckoning Chicago suburbs in the 1960s. Mom took a job in a typing pool at a large oil company nearby and my stepdad rode the commuter…

by Milt Montague

We were flying home after spending several enchanting days in San Jose, Costa Rica, a tiny republic just north of the Panama Canal and south of Mexico, where the climate is never hot and…

by Sarah Scarborough

I woke up with slight confusion to the feeling of a sharp, quick, but non-painful touch to my head; I had been hit by an unidentified flying object. I glanced to my right and…

by Georgia Knapp

The locals were wrapped in parkas, hats, and gloves. Anna and I wore t-shirts, jeans, and cardigans slung across our arms. It was early afternoon. The olive skin and thick black hair of the…

by McKenna Castleberry

Boarding a plane is a lot like going to church. You go into a room full of pews or chairs with people you don’t know. Typically you feel antsy, you want to leave. You…

by Carole Lee

So this isn't going to be some sentimental airplane story that'll make you feel something in your heart and inspire you to put your best foot forward. I'll save that sort of thing for…

by Barbara Rady Kazdan

Travel by air should be a time of leisure; a chance to escape your humdrum worries. —1950’s airline promotion, National Air Science Museum When I was growing up a plane trip was a big…

by Dan Morey

All flights from Erie, Pennsylvania, depart from the clumsily titled Erie International Airport Tom Ridge Field. Not only does this name fail to roll (or even crawl) off the tongue, but it is also…

by Paul C. Dalmas

You know the moment. Bleary-eyed from a long air trip, you slouch at the baggage carousel with your fellow passengers sharing a single unspoken question: Did my luggage make it? A bell sounds. Machinery…

by Peter Bracking

I am a space-race child. I was an Elroy. From a very young age I was aware of the sky. The television and radio were filled with spacecraft and astronauts seeking unknown planets. I…

by Michaela Brady

My last breath of outside had not yet swept through my lungs before I found myself inside yet again. After wiggling out of the leather-scented headache of the limo, I had taken a slow,…

by Benjamin Rietema

As I writing these words, I’m sitting in a small aluminum tube about 38,000 feet above the frigid waters of the Pacific—where I’m sure that if we crash I will not only die (despite…

by Richard Kiln

The Lufthansa flight from Milan, bound ultimately for New York, was crowded and uncomfortable. I needed to switch planes in Frankfurt, which elicited no great reaction on my part. While I preferred direct flights,…

by Tom McCarron

Thoughts of kickflips and 50/50 grinds slid through my mind as if on a polished granite ledge. The thoughts flipped and spun and twisted my head into a different world. Skateboarding; and I could…

by L. V. Vehaskari

“Quick, Mama. Lift up your foot.” “I can’t,” Mama sputtered. “This seat doesn’t give me any room. What are you doing?” I bent over, squashed in between the crammed seats, w

by Chris Wiewiora

At arrivals, a man stood with his chest out. His middle stretched against his seaweed green wool sweater. The man smiled at Dad. “Czesc, Zdzichu,” Dad said. Dad and Zdzichu hugged. I’d only seen…

by Alina Stefanescu

SCENARIO A young pregnant female stands in the security line at Birmingham International Airport. She works at a DC nonprofit but flies back to Alabama for ob-gyn appointments. The wedding ring is missing. RISK…

by Hanna Maxwell

Hour three in the Newark airport. I could see the skyline of New York from Terminal C. We’d landed after turbulence and clouds that looked as if you could sit in them. We knew…

by Madeleine Feola

My fingers wind their way into my earbud cord, faded bluish and dreamlike in the dim glow of the seatback screen. Wrapping the black wire around my thumb, over and over, around and back,…

by Ben Read

The only time I’ve ever eaten McDonald’s without feeling guilt was in the Denver Airport. I was hungry. The hash browns were good. Who cares about deforestation before 6am? My brother, parents, grandparents,

by Andrew Arnett

I settled into my seat on board China Ailrines flight 1133 and opened the complimentary China Daily to the article "Today is the Most Balanced Day of the Century." It was November 2, 2011,…

by Scott Saalman

So, everyone has boarded our transoceanic aircraft at O’Hare. The flight safety message has started. It’s the kind you watch on TV monitors, not a flight attendant’s live reenactment of what you should

by Kathryn Kohnert

We stored small roller bags in the bins above row twenty-three, then settled into our seats and exchanged names, places of origin, and reasons for travel. Similar introductions took place throughout the back cabin…

by Amy Gutierrez

I watch as the man chews. He chews big, big, big and then tiny (chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp). He bites into the gooey cheese sandwich, jaws locking and popping as he tries to force…

by Jennifer Wagley

I enter relationships the same way I enter planes. I settle in quickly and then immediately begin searching for emergency exits, planning an escape route should one prove necessary. Three months in and the…

by Lisa Kay Adam

As our flight lifted over the city, he thought he could pick out which house was his friend's, the one with the swimming pool—among house after house with pools sprawling in the paisley pattern…

by Mark Edwin Jenkins

I’m on my way back to Poland, where I’ve been a dozen times designing Western-style shopping malls in Eastern Europe. Flying from my home in Dallas to Toronto on the first leg of my…

by Raymond Pun

From a museum library to a prison library, I’ve worked in all kinds of libraries. I’ve also traveled to many countries such as the U.K, Russia and France to see their libraries and I…

by Greta Foltos

Not many people are willing to jump out of a plane with nothing but some cloth and string strapped to their backs. Of those who are willing, almost all would want to be strapped…

by Kron Vollmer

“A ukulele,” said the Australian in the seat next to me, eyeing the instrument peeking out of my carry-on. “If we’re stuck here much longer, you’ll have to play for us.” We had a

by Christopher Shipman

At the airport a pregnant mother tries to pick her toddler up by the hair on his head. I wish it were me glaring up at his pissed-off mother’s shiny thighs, like two orphaned…

by Lauren NuDelman

I’ve been in plenty of uncomfortable situations on airplanes before: the requisite overweight passenger suffocating my comfort zone, or the squalling baby who cries as her ears pop with the altitude change. There w

by Sean Talbot

26 April 2013 Dear Heeth, My fifth annual pilgrimage to a remote fishing village on the far edge of the world—Bristol Bay—ends and begins today. Our two-prop plane just flew over Kenai, your burial…

by Bernard Barnes

Airplane travel, I realize, is all about tension and release. It begins even before you leave the house. You pack your bags and agonize over what to bring, what not to bring, will this…

by Emily Grant

Flying in a plane is pretty simple, really. If you’re a coach flyer, it’s cramped and stuffy, the person next to you is too big, the one behind you too small, and somewhere nearby…

by Phillip Barron

"Thrust and lift," says the sexual sounding diorama diagramming how planes keep up in the air in the metropolitan museum of science and industry, an industry built on dammed up rivers and cheap electricity…

by Aaron Gilbreath

Sitting on a bench in downtown Portland, Oregon, a man asked for a cigarette. When I handed him one, he lowered himself beside me. He wore jean shorts and a yellowing white sleeveless t-shirt.…

by Susan Harlan

I always see soldiers in airports. This is just about the only place I see them. I see them in the Charlotte Douglas airport, especially around the holidays. Alone. In groups. In uniform. I…

by Lauren NuDelman

I’ve been in plenty uncomfortable situations on airplanes before: the requisite overweight passenger suffocating my comfort zone, or the squalling baby who cries as her ears pop with the altitude change. There was

by Matthew Vollmer

Forgive us, O LORD, for not looking, for averting our eyes, for opening the Sky Mall magazine even though we couldn’t truly be said to be interested in Roland the Gargoyle Sculptural Rainspout or…

by Lara Lillibridge

When you fly at a thousand feet, you see the world differently. Commercial planes fly at an anonymous altitude, so far up that houses become invisible. General aviation flies lower. We are able to…

by Lara Lillibridge

I fly a lot. Not, perhaps, as much as a flight attendant or member of congress, but probably more than a lot of people. I will take any opportunity to jump on a plane,…

by Dean Miller

As my flight from Colorado to Oregon descended over the Columbia River, I noticed a fly buzzing about the cabin. The aircraft’s flight originated from Chicago, and I wondered if the fly hopped aboard…

by Miles Stearns

I was young and asleep and dreaming of things which get lost upon waking. It had been a long day in the Mexico City airport. My asthma acted up almost immediately upon arriving and…

by James Stafford

“Pay attention, boy! Get on the other side so we can push her out.” I skittered under the belly of the darkened airplane and grabbed her strut. My father and I had just enough…

by Kassia Halcli

I’ve been the girl vomiting uncontrollably in the aisle seat beside you. I’ve been the girl with a stack of barf bags handed up to her by various pitying passengers. I’ve been the girl…

by Luanne Castle

The worst part of flying with a newly reconstructed foot is finding the right seat. I cross my fingers that the people on board since the last stop aren’t all in love with the…

by Sandra Park

A layover is a lay without sleep or sex. Like a silent sled, the red tram zips from domestic to international gates, transport without a sense of direction, follow the arrow. What I…

by James Moran

Of the throngs of humanity sleeping on cots by the heat-blasted roadside our flashing honking careening bus disturbed not a soul. We had witnessed this Indian ability to sleep through anything before. We were…

by Deborah Elder

Sitting on the lid of the toilet I check the bars of my phone and dial his number. This is the usual spot, less static on the line and the only place in the…

by Margaret Goerig

There are moments; do we all know these moments? You're flying. You're at 35,000 feet, or something like it, and there are clouds—so many puffy, white things, floating below, and then there are the…

by Bobby Schweizer

Looking at the bustling bodies in an airport or the rows of seated passengers in a plane, it would seem that air travel is about people. People take business trips, visit their families, and…

by Shannon Guerreso

My cell phone was ringing: number unknown. What do we have here? I wondered excitedly. A friend in the premature throes of separation angst? A former flame who had caught the Facebook wind that…

by Merrill Sunderland

All around me is the snap, crackle, pop, sigh, hiss, shloop, and swoosh of air. In this airplane, I’m vacuum-sealed like packaged meat, yet air moves all around me. Changing places. Over water and…

by Michael Martone

The Indianapolis department store,* When, commissioned Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, to address the sky above the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in May of 1920, the year the famous race instituted the…

by Michael Martone

Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, attempting to elope with his fiancée, Aimee Cour, escaping from Fort Wayne to Hillsdale, Michigan, where he believed they could be married quickly, crashed his home-built…

by Chloe Olewitz

I try to make conversation with the furred woman who takes too long to arrange herself to my right in the window seat next to me, I fail. I reach down to the oversized…

by Kevin M. Flanagan

I first visited Pittsburgh in Summer 2003. When the friend who was hosting me asked what I wanted to see, the only thing I can remember mentioning was the Monroeville Mall. I knew very…

by Jennifer Ng

I never planned to carry the laptop. The 15” Macbook Pro was intended to be left on my desk at work—like a dying patient perched on a translucent stand and with cords snaking to…

by Jennifer Weitman

It was that damn kid. That crying baby did it. The couple next to me—tanned and ugly—argued about the hot sauce they’d have to throw away because someone forgot to put it in their…

by Patrici Flores

I’m either an idiot, or I enjoy the surprises that come from terrible planning. My ego much prefers the latter as an excuse for my hastiest decisions, including the time I jumped on cheap…

by Amanda Williams

The Korean cab driver is missing half of his teeth, has chew stuck in his bottom lip, and reeks of Kimchi, the fermented cabbage that sits in the sun for months baking on Korean…

by Neal Pollack

I’m betraying my age by revealing this, but I’ve always loved the Saturday Night Live film from the early 80s where Eddie Murphy goes undercover as a white person. He discovers that being white…

by Whitney Mackman

I am a frequent flyer and frequently a problem flyer. Security has asked me to step into “special” screening lines so many times that I have just come to expect situations. But I never…

by Jessica Shepherd

I stare into my computer screen trying to do the reading that my university has so thoughtfully assigned before the semester has even begun. I lose focus and the screen goes black but I…

by Koty Neelis

I rush to my gate only to realize I have an extra 45 minutes to waste. I sit down, fidgeting nervously. Children are screaming. I hear languages I don’t know how to speak. Loud…

by Brian Oliu

If only we could fly like they do—things that I cannot imagine, all things platinum, women in clothes that I designed in a dream, comfort without itch, no kings above me, all threads where…

by Barbara Benjamin

The face of travel has changed dramatically. Rules have shifted south, as prices have continuously flown upward. It takes a patient person to fly the "not-so-friendly" skies these days, while maintaining a sens

by Nathan C. Martin

I remember passing a Nalgene bottle—a popular outdoor accoutrement in the West—full of Red Bull and vodka around the car on the way to Salt Lake City International Airport. My 19-year-old girlfriend and I…

by Deborah Elder

“He gets airsick” she chirps, handing over his duffle and walking away. I show him how to work the seatbelt, put him where I can see him, and then hand him an airsickness bag…

by José Duarte

I am neither an adventurer nor a traveler. I like things that are secure, that you can take for granted. But that is not life, which is why we need to take some chances.…

by Erica Garza

The first time I fell in love with a fellow passenger was in 2002. It happened on a tiny plane that I boarded at the Houston airport (a layover from L.A.) en route to…

by Lawrence Weill

We had taken trains all up and down the eastern seaboard, and as true baby-boomers we had traveled across the country several times by car, but I had never flown. It was 1968 and…

by Naomi Bryant

For my dad (1963-2011), who flew away.... We settled down at the east end of the airport, waiting for the next flight. Everything was quiet. It was the time of morning when people…

by Lucy Corin

Some bored friend of mine had driven me to the airport and we talked about boredom. We felt it but remained skeptical about it defining our generation. I said I was keeping an eye…

by Liz Stephens

I don’t think the ink on my brother’s shirt had dried on the day that I flew in a small single-engine plane for the first time. New pilots traditionally rip away the bottom of…

by Margaret O'Brien

“Bet you don’t know what they’re saying,” the Frenchman said to me in accented English as he clicked on the laptop that sat on his desk. Intrigued, I listened. To my surprise it sounded…

by Jacob Dodson

The plane did not have an engine explode shortly after takeoff, which would have forced us into the Pacific Ocean and forced me to quickly grab a plastic bag to secure my external hard…

by Kurt Mullen

One thing nice about space is it keeps going.

by Jocelyn Kerr

I had experienced turbulence before. I never minded turbulence. I'm not the praying type, and I don't frighten easily. I don't Hail Mary or clutch neighbors, and I never, ever think, "We're all going

by Kevin Haworth

We will not cross paths with the bodies. We are due at Ben Gurion airport in just a few hours, and we are deep into the final busy-ness of moving out of our Tel…

by Anna Hearn

I have lost track of the many, many miles I have clocked in the air and at various airports around the world. Some airports, Singapore Changi Airport for instance, are like five-star hotels, whilst…

by Gaia Veenis

“You’re traveling into the future,” my friend typed into a Facebook chat box before I embarked on the 17-hour journey across the international dateline to his hometown of Melbourne, Australia. I was cou

by Stefani Cox

One look at the situation and I knew I could outsmart TSA. The body scanner stood in the middle of the room like the rude intruder at a party who everyone wants to pretend…

by JP Hatcher

Though I have always been a steadfast athlete and competitor, I lack grace in my day-to-day endeavors. Perhaps it is because my anxious mind is always focused on anything else but what I’m doing…

by Nicole Lee

I could see airplanes landing and taking off in a steady stream as we approached the airport. Jumbo jets thundering in from their long haul across the Atlantic; small planes circling like flighty songbirds…

by Fredric Stanley

I had been standing in the departure area, leaning against a column right in front of the boarding gate, when I noticed my flight's status change on the screen. At first it just said…

by Marsha Temlock

The tall thin man with the wispy white beard proceeded his wife down the aisle. He was schlepping two black suitcases and a round black hatbox; she grasped a large Bloomingdale’s holiday shopping bag…

by Anita Breland

My first impressions of India are also nearly my last. I have arrived in Mumbai on a sultry January evening, after an eight-hour flight from wintry Zurich. En route, I daydreamed of temple processions,…

by Hannah Griggs

Let me start out by expressing how much I hate flying. Three years ago I had a bad experience falling from a cliff while on vacation, leaving me with an almost paralyzing fear of…

by Anca L. Szilágyi

I’m a firm believer in write-what-you-desperately-want-to-know. Research, empathize, repeat. It’s not impossible to write beyond your own experience or beyond your own precise demographic. But it is a risk. I

by Lisa McKenzie

I don’t remember the airport and I don’t remember the year, but I’ll never forget the poor able-bodied soul who exited the handicapped stall to find a line of five wheelchairs and five attendants…

by Len Kuntz

My daughter is running out of room. Where she’s not pierced, tattoos take birth on all exposed areas—eyelids, and even inside her lower gums. Her face is a rash of Roman numerals and glyphs…

by Chloe Olewitz

What is to be said about that shrieking baby three rows back? I remember the story of my twenty-second-story Gardenia neighbor in a Manhattan restaurant with a similar screaming child. A grown woman whose…

by Jeff Hawthorne

Passing through TSA security checkpoints has become like a Stanley Kubrick film, with partially clothed adults meeting randomly for moody conversation and dark rituals. People under the age of 18 really should have their

by Giulianna Di Nenna

Life-searching questions arise at night, after sunset, and not just on park benches along river banks. Watching rushing water, reflecting upon its cleansing qualities, can soothe. If only I could have been near a…

by Tasha Cotter

When I read that Thomas Mann likely chose the name Tadzio because it held the word Tod, which means death, I felt satisfied, but then I noticed a gauzy cloth had fastened itself over…

by Cloé Vaz

In April 2012, I went back to the place I was born: Guinea-Bissau, a small West African country. It was definitely an emotional trip, as I hadn’t seen my father for a year and…

by Maria Cruz

We were on our night flight back home when I noticed that after the fasten seat belt sign went off and the stewardess started to serve drinks, this really old couple seated next to…

by Ilana Nunes

When he and his 10 siblings were born, my heart experienced one of the happiest joys possible. There they were: my furred grandchildren, the perfect copy of their beloved mom; eleven at once! I…

by Cemil Bostan

I booked a flight from Oporto, Portugal, to Weeze, Germany, on Ryanair. Two weeks before my flight I had made a trip to Spain and had bought some gifts for my friends in Germany.…

by Eileen Brunetto

Sprawled out in coach, I settled next to my husband as he rooted through his stack of unread New Yorkers. Contemplating the tiny bottles of chardonnay coming my way, I had just been assured…

by Tânia Limbert

I clearly remember my first airplane ride. It was in my last year of high school, and instead of taking the the usual mainstream trip to Lloret Del Mar (Costa Brava, Spain), my friends…

by Bárbara Dabó

I went to the airport for the first time when I was 13 or 14 years old. I was picking up my sister and her new boyfriend who were coming from England. I was…

by Marta da Silva Carvalho

The best stories of our lives are never truly remembered by us; they are told and retold by proud mothers and grandmothers. This particular memory was told to me by my grandmother who was…

by Mar Scheerer

Use your breath as a guiding force for movement and transformation. Breath. Movement. Transformation. I closed my eyes. I was on the plane, unsure if I felt grateful or regretful to be hung over.…

by Luís Pires

A few years ago I went to London with some friends. Just entering the airport gave me the feeling of entering a whole new universe. There were busy people hopelessly trying to run with…

by Helena Neves

I love travelling but I hate flying, which presents rather a big dilemma every time I’m at an airport waiting for a flight—they’re never on-time. My airplane phobia sets in motion and my head…

by João Diogo

Clothes? Check! Crucial hygiene products? Check (except the swabs, I always forget to buy them)! Cell phone and mp3 player? Totally check! Annoying and stressed brother? Unfortunately, check. It’s time to go to the

by Anouk de Jonge

In March 2010, I went on a trip from my home in the Netherlands to Brazil. I travelled around a little bit, visited Rio de Janeiro, Foz do Iguaçu and Florianópolis. The favelas, the…

by Diogo Almeida

A few years ago, I went on one of those terrible affairs known as “family vacations” with, well, my family. At the time this included both my parents and three cousins. Mind you that…

by Nicoletta-Laura Dobrescu

In 1998, I flew for the first time when I was a second-year university student. Many people may find it rather late for a first flight, but at the time nobody around me thought…

by Vanessa Cipriano

When I first started to travel by airplane I was just a baby—not even able to walk yet. The flights were always to Belgium where we visited family. But when that family moved to…

by Bárbara Sorger

My mother used to work in a publishing house that had three magazines related to Africa and Brazil. Once a year there used to be a party in one of the capitals of the…

by Marta Rocha

I don’t understand airports. Aren’t they supposed to be a place where people just sit down, wait for the plane, and then fly? I mean, nowadays we can almost live in there; Tom Hanks…

by Cody Acosta

Every time I step foot onto an airplane, I order a ginger-ale. It has become a sort of ritual of air travel for me; thinking about the peculiar difference between ginger-ale and 7 Up…

by Monica Aust

I’ve been flying all my life; in fact, I even flew in utero, when my mother was pregnant with me, when all I’d ever known at that point was complete nothingness and the curvature…

by Kobus Moolman

I recently spent two months as a guest of the English Department at the University of Calgary. I was on a sabbatical, completing work on my doctorate. Getting to Canada involved an almost twenty-hour…

by Cara Marino

My aunt needed to get to the airport and my mother happily volunteered her time and that of mine and my younger sister. Our trip should have been uneventful, but when you have a…

by Randy Malamud

It’s simulation day at Atlanta’s new Maynard H. Jackson Jr. International Terminal. Fifteen hundred people with nothing better to do have volunteered to come down and try it out two weeks before opening day.

by Jordan Tyler

We are making a trip from Dallas to Palm Springs for a national powerlifting meet. In the Phoenix airport, our layover stop, we are about to board. I point out a small plane outside…

by Kelly Ross

Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return. —Leonardo da Vinci “Flight 275…

by Asia Stephens-Argraves

First, grab your pairs of pants and shirts. Don’t forget your toothbrush or you’ll have to use you finger for the rest of the trip. Once you’re packed, it’s off to the airport. Walk…

by Erin Seidemann

I named my Cessna “Orion” for the constellation that was shining majestically above him on the night he became mine. Not too long after Orion was born, I washed and detailed him. (I say…

by Tarn Wilson

He sat in the window seat, immersed in a magazine. I registered little about him other than he’d crossed his legs, he wore cuffed business slacks, and his thick hair was graying at the…

by Kyle Talbot

My history with air travel has led to an increased loss of hair at a young age. I’ve been late for flights, delayed by flights, and even unintentionally abused by the people on flights.…

by May Todd

Since I was a child, my parents have told me that I bloom where I am planted. This first referred to my habits as I learned to walk, but the phrase still applies. When…

by Jourdyn McClain

Orville and Wilbur Wright had their first successful experiment with the airplane on December 17, 1903. Today the airplane is not perfect or anywhere close to it. There have been crashes, explosions, malfunctions—m

by Emily Roth

Until my first year away at college, I had not traveled out of the country. I had flown from Washington to Florida and yet never took the relatively short trip from my Washington hometown…

by Susan Vander Kooi

The turbulence started suddenly and I gripped the armrests and closed my eyes against my jarring reality. I was coming back home from a ten-week study program in the British Isles, and there was…

by Jessie Hodet

Birthdays are always a time for celebration. A couple of years ago my family and I had planned a fabulous cruise down the Mexican Riviera. My husband, our two kids, my mom, and my…

by Katie Harriman

I was sitting in the aisle seat. My mom, my step-dad, and my then five-year-old half-brother, Sean, were sitting in the row beside me. We were on a five-hour flight from Los Angeles to…

by Lydia Buchanan

I could tell you about the time that my family and I had to make an emergency landing in Colorado, amidst silver-suited firefighters and then had to suffer through a series of flights back…

by Krystal Valle

Alaska Airlines claims the flight from Yakima, Washington, to Seattle is only about 43 minutes. This is a lie. The actual flight takes 17 minutes, but you end up spending more time on the…

by Elaine Bassier

When I was 14 and a half, six years ago, I went on my first plane trip without my parents. Delta has a program that allows children from ages eight to 14 to fly…

by Lauren Hunt

You: Twenty-something bearded fellow, right aisle seat on a Southwest flight to Oakland. Me: College student in the middle seat with the huge book you thought was Harry Potter but was actually a collection…

by Jack Bernard

Gamba Osaka is a Japanese soccer team in the Asian Football League. I'd never heard of Gamba until Tuesday morning. It looks like pretty good team from what I can tell, but that's not…

by Mitchell Linn Harris

Every ounce on an airplane is accounted for. Every ounce is expensive. Knowing this does not offer any sort of comfort when you realize there are three armrests for two people in some rows,…

by Phyllis McKinley

“You go first, Nana, to break a path.” These are my instructions from six-year-old Josh. I plunk onto a sled in the sub-zero Canadian air with eight-year-old Rachel bundled in front of me. Off…

by Simone Ashby

It was 1996 and I was at the end of a two-week holiday in Malaysia from my teaching job in Korea. My employer had asked with no trace of humor that I return to…

by Julian Hanna

Future wife and I were waiting at SFO to catch a post-Christmas flight back to Edinburgh, Scotland, where we lived at the time. It was the second leg of a lengthy tour to meet…

by Jeffrey McDaniel

I must admit something happened to my spirit during check-in: a dampening, but also a lit match dragged around the fringes. So this is what it feels like to have a corporation’s brand seared…

by Valery V. Petrovskiy

The TU-134 aircraft was quite suitable, if not for all the passengers who packed it like a communal flat. Without passengers, the cabin would have looked quite nice: neat with virgin white headrests. I…

by Nina Katchadourian

While in the lavatory on a domestic flight in March 2010, I spontaneously put a tissue paper toilet cover seat cover over m

by Cory Emerson

I sit in seat 22F, the plane idling on the Tampa runway, my brain idling in my skull. I am assigned 22E, the dreaded middle seat, but a heavyset, elderly woman offers me the…

by Mark J Brewin Jr

—for Kevin Malone When I was a kid I’d fall asleep in any moving vehicle at the drop of a hat. There was this one time when I was in my parents’ Chrysler, leaned…

by Joe Bardin

While living in Tel Aviv, I received a call from a girl I’d had a weekend romance with in New York City after college. She invited me to meet her in Hawaii to celebrate…

by Roselle O'Brien

The sun was rising this morning when I pulled out of the parking lot. I stopped, shut off the headlights. They were the wrong illumination for the dawn’s tease of wild places lingering silent…

by Phillip Barron

"Thrust and lift," says the sexual sounding diorama diagramming how planes keep up in the air in the metropolitan museum of science and industry, an industry built on dammed up rivers and cheap electricity…

by Jane Blakeley

On a connecting flight from Tallahassee home to Kansas City, I fell in love. Or, rather, I was coming from one love and rebounding into the thin, synthetic air of another. I crammed myself…

by Jessi Probus

Communities can be drawn, created, discovered, inferred. But communities can also be overlooked. There is a community of people who are all in airplanes at the same time. At any one moment there are…

by Sharon Kurtzman

For the last 16 years, my husband has spent about a third of each year traveling for business. The kids and I miss him when he’s gone and though he loves his job as…

by Laurie Stone

The girl’s navel winks below her halter top, and her dimpled ass swells above her terry shorts. Her perfection forecasts its falling off and is marked, too, by her innocence this will happen. Her…

by Anna Leahy & Douglas Dechow

For several years, we lived in Galesburg, Illinois, a town with a small airport, a place we’d swing by, trying to catch sight of a takeoff or landing. Once, we saw a shiny silver…

by Rita de Costa

Even if I didn't have my nacrolepsy under control by that point, I thought I knew what I was doing—I thought I could manage the flight and two plane changes. It was 1979, and…

by Candace Mobley

Two weeks earlier I was at this same place with our three children. We each held red, white, and blue balloons tied to dying sunflowers. I only wanted to see my husband, to feel…

by Tim Lantz

During the second sunrise of November 1, 2010, it occurred to me: Last night I was in a haunted house on the other side of the world. It was the second of three flights…

by Jack Bernard

Take a good look at this picture. Wide-body aircraft cabin, spacious seating, smiling flight attendants and so on. Remember this picture the next time you climb aboard. I doubt that it's the picture that…

by Michael Cornelius

I was in my last year of graduate school, and I was flying home for the holidays. It was Christmas Eve, and I’d just managed to finish my last assignment and hand in my…

by Matthew Butts

I've travelled to China, Japan, and Hong Kong, but human existance remains a mystery hidden inside a complex and unbalanced duality called "body and mind." On one flight from China to America, my seatmate…

by Christopher Shipman

My wife gets gassy and wonders if I still love her in this airport where she squints her face to shape how the air may smell for a few seconds, because I don’t squint…

by Suzy Eynon

I treat the date of travel printed on my flight itinerary as an expiration date. I always manage to board the plane, but the fear stews, seeping out in trickles I believe to be…

by Jeanette Lukowski

On Friday, April 24, 2009, my 15-year-old daughter ran away from home. The next day she was discovered in Chicago, approximately 650 miles from our home. While I could have driven to Chicago to…

by Jack Bernard

I think of myself as a short-term pessimist and long-term optimist. I try to take the long view and think positively about people and the world. Lately it’s fashionable to talk about America’s decline,…

by Andy Shaindlin

My foreign study experience as a college student was in 1985. I spent six months in Brussels, arriving in January. Brussels in January—and February, and March—is a gray, damp, chilled place. By the time…

by Chris Glover

You start out thinking it's a child-like feeling. You look out the window and wonder whether this is your first flight or your tenth. Maybe it's your hundredth or even more, who knows? But…

by Cristina Garrigós

On September 11, 2001, we were flying on Lufthansa from Madrid to Washington via Frankfurt. The flight from Madrid to Frankfurt had been perfect. But as we were about to leave Frankfurt, the flight…

by Roger Sedarat

After 17 years of marriage, I had a little affair with my wife. Because it happened on an airplane, to this day I find flying especially erotic. On this particular family trip I had…

by Hugo Reinert

For hours, it seemed, I stood out there on the runway with the other passengers—watching the fire crews, wondering if I might still make it home in time for the funeral. She was a…

by Scott Saalman

My great-great uncle, Joe Reed, was a wing walker in the 1920s. He also did loop-the-loops, barrel rolls and hung from planes' axles. Uncle Joe was clearly insane. It’s ironic to have an ancestor…

by Sara Elle

My name is Sara and I’m an alcoholic; I did some of my best drinking on airplanes. By the time I was eighteen, I had a fake ID, a rich boyfriend who lived on…

by Bobby Fox

After a trip that embodied Ukraine’s unofficial motto (“Ukraine is not for the meek”), it came as no surprise that departing from the country was, in a word, difficult. Two days before my departure,…

by Bobby Fox

When I finally disembarked off the third plane on my journey to Ukraine, I was greeted by a foreboding, single, small, grey, Soviet-era terminal. Inside, the stuffy, dingy building, I followed the herd to…

by Pearu Unga

I hate flying. My two-hour and ten-minute flight to Prague seemed to last for at least half a day. But then I had been awake all night and your brain tends to hit the…

by Stewart Sinclair

The commercial pilot has pretty well completed the transition from hero to robot that Roland Barthes explored in 1955 in his essay “The Jet-Man.” The jetliner itself has lost the appeal that once made…

by Bobby Fox

When I arrived at the gate for connecting flight from Germany to Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, it was clear I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. The crowded waiting area was filled with the unmistakable look of gloomy…

by Donald Dunbar

Though my flight was at eight in the morning, I decided (?) it would be an excellent idea to stay up until six-ish smoking bowl after bowl with Vanessa, her boyfriend Paul, and some…

by Jess Stoner

It was 2000, and I had arrived at Reagan National Airport with enough time to have a beer before my flight. It was only a few months after the Music City Miracle had yet…

by David A. Fitschen

2/28/98 Quantas Airways Seat 51H I could have started a few days before this, but I saw no point. The flight is now. Which makes it the day the tour starts. 11:21 p.m. I…

by Matthew Dexter

I walked through the Newark International Airport metal detector with an ounce of marijuana in my jockstrap and two pellets of mescaline in my sock. I had removed the protective cup to provide more…

by B. Frayn Masters

On a plane back home from Portland, OR, to Burbank, CA, I flopped into my spacious window seat. A few months earlier, through a humor-driven letter pleading with Alaska Airlines customer service to up…

by Marisa Mangani

Twenty minutes into the flight and the plane’s ceiling tore open. Misty air fogged into the cabin. It had been a three-hour wait in the Miami airport for the connecting flight to the Dominican…

by Rebecca Renee Hess

I am overweight. Since childhood, size has defined me. Teased, tormented and taunted as a kid because of my butt and belly, adulthood and obesity presents a unique set of problems. One of those…

by Fargo Kantrowitz

I remember the snow. I wasn't brought up on snow back in the deserts of Las Vegas, but in Boston they had a lot of it. I remember it sitting in the giant push-back…

by Amanda Pleva

"Now boarding all rows for Flight 920, with service to Tokyo Narita." I stared longingly at the neighboring gate as I waited with my crew for the pilots to arrive. Tokyo was my favorite…

by Chelsey Johnson

I have always led parallel lives, as if one were not enough. Some people do this by having affairs, or playing Second Life or World of Warcraft, or living in the closet, or being…

by Alex Pruteanu

I flew to Washington DC from Fort Lauderdale one week after 9/11. The country was still gripped by fear or perceived fear or government-manufactured fear or...simple madness. People in the thousands were assaulting their

by Jonathan Small

*DING* “Uh, well folks, looks like our trusty little, uh, navigator here, well, she seems to be pointing us in, uh, the wrong way here, so, we’re gonna, uh, go and get that checked…

by Dustin Michael

I. There’s a minor interrogation going on in the front of the plane. The old guy in 1C is laying it on the flight attendant, a tall redhead in her early twenties with a…

by L. Marie Cook

My bags were safely in the overhead compartment. I had managed to pack reasonable clothing in between paralyzing fits of sadness that left my brain completely thoughtless. Then came complete clarity. I need some…

by Vance Osterhout

A wizard is a person who knows so much more about a subject than you that their knowledge of how to manipulate reality escapes your understanding completely. I was introduced to this conception of…

by James Schaberg

As we roll toward the runway in preparation for takeoff, I catch sight of two red foxes. The pair is skirting the taxiway in the tall brush, probably headed for the nearest hole joining…

by Kimberly Schubert

It's a strange feeling to be stuck between two fat people, two relatively thin walls, and certain death. Using my arm rests is out of the question for large and overflowing reasons. So here…

by Brenda Tobias

Are there any airplane experiences left that do not bear a strong resemblance to an emergency shelter? This is not a rhetorical question. When they asked me to book my own flight, I did…

by Jeffrey Morgan

My father has a hot pink suitcase. When I don’t fly with him, I think about it. I think about it during descent. Maybe it’s the cabin pressure, the gum chewing, sad babies with…

by Katie Pugh

There’s no holiday spirit in airports. It’s Christmas, and I am flying from Pittsburgh to southern Virginia to visit my family. Everybody boarding the plane has an air of pleasantry as fake as the…

by Alethea Kehas

Each summer when I was a child, my sister and I would fly 3,000 miles across the country to visit a place my mother was trying to forget. We drove from our home in…

by Mara Huber

I wish I could recall when the utter absurdity of that initial trip revealed itself. I was dropped off at the airport by taxi, not wanting to disturb my family in the wee hours…

by Kelly Bergin

The first hour is anxiety. The pot she smoked in short-term parking is wearing off and the panic becomes physical when she realizes that her medicine is packed in cargo, somewhere below her seat.…

by Jennifer Cresap

Once upon a time, I wore coordinating pant suits with crisp white shirts and sensible low-heeled shoes and flew all over the country meeting with clients and earning extraordinary amounts of frequent flier miles.…

by Vincent Eaton

“Over there is your airplane, sir.” The Munich airport employee had checked my one-way ticket to Rome, then gestured to the bright tarmac of that reflected a bright winter day. There, over a ways…

by Roxane Gay

When I was a child, the people who smoked at the back of the airplane were so sophisticated. They sat in the last four or five or six rows, lounging in a gray cloud…

by Marisa Mangani

It’s August and I’ll be fifty in nine days. We’re at the Tampa Airport, checked in and sitting at the bar for a breakfast rum drink because my redneck, sharkman, lover-husband is afraid to…

by Carla Sarett

My father had not flown for a decade or so—perhaps even longer, certainly long enough so that he had no concept of the nightmarish array of security measures, police and bizarre check-points introduced since…

by Pam Houston

It is 8:00 AM on a Sunday morning in September, and I am down in the East Jesus section of the Denver International Airport where all the smallest United Express flights come and go.…

by Tasha Cotter

In the dream the man is seen in the terminal with a woman. They are underground, facing each other, and the lights flashing overhead go in stages of blue and red. There is a…

by Allie Marini Batts

Flight: it’s such an equalizer. Whether it's LAX or LaGuardia, Hartsfield-Jackson or Sea-Tac: we're all the same when we're waiting, we're all passengers. Books, notepads, iPods, our little distract

by Lillian Swanson-Day

I’m relieved when the guy takes his briefcase off of the seat beside him and looks at me. It’s pretty much the only seat left at my gate, except for ones next to families…

by Stacy Thowe

The day had finally come. It was my dream trip. After scraping by, cutting back, and eating at home, I still didn’t have enough money for the trip. So I did what most Americans…

by Mike Coe

“It is not really necessary to look too far into the future; we see enough already to be certain it will be magnificent. Only let us hurry and open the roads.” —Wilbur Wright “Science

by Nicole Sheets

I swigged cough syrup as discreetly as I could, in a way that I hoped seemed all business rather than recreational. I stowed a roll of square Halls lozenges in my jacket pocket for…

by Dolores Banerd

Here’s what you need to remember when you return from any trip: No one wants to hear your travel stories. No one. Not your doting parents who usually hang on your every word. Not…

by Catherine Newstead

After spending 25 days traveling with my son Blair, his girlfriend Helen, their friends Dave, Reena and Neil, I was flying home, leaving them to continue their exploration of the East Coast of Australia.…

by Tim Morton

Air travel brings up a lot of strong emotions, most of them negative: boredom, scorn, pride, paranoia, anger, loneliness, stupor, smugness, anxiety, sadness, humiliation, tenderness, aggression, fear, frustration, sluggi

by Jacqueline Jules

Dragging my portable closet on wheels I follow a line of tense travelers whining over boarding delays and tight overhead bins until reaching my slender vinyl spot designed to double as a floatation device.…

by Justin Marks

I was on a flight home from Austin, Texas, to New York City in 2005. We were 30 minutes out from JFK when the pilot came on and said we had to make an…

by Alex Pruteanu

I took Hemingway and Bukowski and Palahniuk and F. Scott and Hitchens with me, and we crossed the border into Canada like the hooligans that we are (F. Scott would object to that, but…

by Kevin Bray

In any airport that makes it possible, I like to see the plane on which I will soar. Most terminals I have been in afford fantastic views of the tarmac and the impending plane…

by Elise Gottschalk

Mom tells me that as a toddler I'd look up at a plane in the sky and point and say "Daddy! Daddy!" I don't remember doing this, but I'd guess it's true. After being…

by Christopher Schaberg

It was warm coming down the concourse even in the late evening. The moon lit up the taxiway around the blinking lights and illuminated the planes. It was winter around the airport but the…

by Pam Howard-Jones

I’ve held this birthday card in my hands many times before. We are in early March and the card is ready to embark on its outbound journey to New Zealand. I run my fingers…

by Marcus Speh

Suddenly I remember my trip through the U.S. in 1980: no cells; the locked dials of the Bakelite phone next to the motel bed. 70s colors everywhere, today’s retro was still just yesterday then.…

by Bryan Batt

Over the past several years, I have become quite the frequent flyer, more so than I ever would have thought given the history of my fear of flying. Last year I clocked over 50…

by Sandra Gail Teichmann-Hillesheim

This new beaver stroller suits me, and I'm going to Chicago. Uncut guard hairs, and I know, too warm for the latitude where we live. The sales clerk coveted the cut and sheen, but…

by Ian Ferguson

I had a great job that involved visiting our offices in Asia on a frequent basis so I became very familiar with the Trans-Pacific Business and occasionally First Class routine. Others in my office…

by Wayne Scheer

Alex found flying boring, but when he squeezed past the attractive woman in the aisle seat to get to his, he thought this flight might not be so bad after all. Maybe he could…

by Robby McChargue

Sunday, December 18, 2011 Returning home from Colorado Springs after a week visiting my parents, I find myself, as do all Delta customers, regardless of where they fly from or to, in the Atlanta…

by Chella Courington

I take another half an Ativan, finishing my second cranberry and vodka with soda. The steward comes to the back row (it is a Monday), takes my glass as I nod yes, and asks…

by David Myers

I am distinterested in airplanes. I have some interest in this. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant claims disinterest is necessary to aesthetics. Maybe so. In order to experience art, says Kant, we must…

by Barry Basden

She flees on the first available flight. Still, her suite overlooks Waikiki. For days she stares out to sea and hikes the beach toward Diamond Head. In the evenings, after dinner alone, she writes…

by Koty Neelis

Traveling makes me feel really sexy. I love the way people dress—in business suits and sundresses, in hoodies and pencil skirts. Some are traveling for work, others for pleasure. You’ll never see these people

by Dolores Banerd

On my first 14-hour flight to Bangkok from Los Angeles I became aware that I’m not at the top of the food chain. This is a place reserved exclusively for first class passengers. In…

by Sadie Palomino

I don’t want to tell you that I am a hooker. That story’s old news. I don’t want to tell you that in my luggage, I’ve packed twenty condoms and two vibrators, six changes…

by Christopher Allen

I wouldn't say I like surprises when I travel; I simply don't enjoy planning. I've left that part of the trip to my partner and traveling companion for the last 11 years. He loves…

by Len Kuntz

Seated next to him, the girl keeps herself busy drawing pictures of dismembered pets—dogs, cats, rodents with collars. He pretends not to notice, looking instead out his window at a bright white heaven under…

by Meagan Simmons

I am on a plane en route to the Virgin Islands with my mother, and my father’s body is undergoing an autopsy, and my senior year is starting without me. Everything that occurs in…

by Alex Pruteanu

"I'm not religious," she says. "You know me...live and let live...whatever you believe is okay with me." Her favourite cliche is: "We agree to disagree." She loves America because

by Kim Chinquee

On the plane to Mexico, the woman next to me said she was going to find Jesus. She bounced her boy, a toddler, and said Maine weather made her evil. She smiled at me.…

by Sabrina Nyka

2:59 a.m. and I am wide awake, one minute before the alarm clock goes off. I think to myself: it’s not right to be awake at this time for any reason, why would anything…

by Weldon Ryckman

I let myself drift into sleep, almost. I lean my head back and allow myself to fall in rhythm with the humming undercurrent of the drone of the engines, or maybe it's the wind…

by Chelsey Watley

I open the door, say goodbye to my family, step out of the car, and walk into DFW International Airport. I am going to be gone for one month, for study abroad. I have…

by Josh Highlander

Being a military child usually means lots of travel, from base to base and from assignment to assignment. For me, it meant constantly losing friends, and having to make new ones rather quickly. My…

by Claudia Smithart

When I was a little girl, my dad frequently used to travel for work. He would go to places like New York and Las Vegas. I made him promise that one day he would…

by Taylor Phelps

As a fifth grade boy only months away from the start of middle school, I did my best to mask fear from others hoping to appear as the man I so desperately wanted to…

by Jacob Rodell

We have our special first times which might include our first day of school, first kiss, first time driving, and the infamous first haircut. One of these experiences for me was my first time…

by Payton Moreland

Years ago, when I was an eighth grade student in middle school, I was given the opportunity to be a part of a trip that would go to Spain. After raising the required funds,…

by Jack Saux

This story dates back to the 1970’s, so all statutes of limitations have expired and airline procedures have changed. In the pre-9/11 era, occasionally “bomb threats” could be traced to the last passeng

by Jody Hedstrom

“Ma’am!” The flight attendant barks at me like I’m a stray dog begging for a scrap of food. I let the curtain close behind us and ignore her intimidating glare. “You can’t stay

by Jami Nakamura Lin

We squeeze into our seats, my sister Cori and I. I get there first, so I steal the aisle seat, crushing my pink backpack underneath the seat in front of me. She nestles into…

by John Sierpinski

My girlfriend, Jill, and I are strapped into this plane over Diamond Bar. It’s after our vacation, and we’re heading home to Milwaukee. I’m looking at this guy across the aisle. He looks like…

by Elynne Chaplik-Aleskow

A few years after the commercial plane crash that killed my grandmother, my university creative writing Professor told me in his critique that I had the raw material for a masterpiece. I wonder what…

by Lindsey Silken

When I decided to fly to Memphis for a second date, my friends were suspiciously supportive. I guess they figured that between playing writer by night and frazzled editor by day, I could stand…

by Konrad Eisen

I’m in the window seat typing...when out of the corner of my eye out the window I see what looks to be a rocket. It’s a plane, of course. But it’s incredibly close. For…

by Ehud Sela

At thirty thousand feet above the plane began to shake. “Turbulence,” explained the captain over the PA system. “Fasten your seat belts.” And wait, I thought he said, after all that’s all yo

by Susan Hodara

For the last four hours of our flight from Nice to New York, the man’s body lay across the middle seats of the row behind us. The flight attendants had draped red airline blankets…

by Arthur Plotnik

I was 42 when the American Airlines aircraft I'd boarded in Chicago was set to explode in midair. Beneath me, in the baggage hold, was a live bomb shipped by Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the…

by Kate Dernocoeur

The first thing is the light, opaque like glacial runoff. At first, I don’t even recognize this murky peculiarity as light, but I can see that it is somehow framed, organized. After some time,…

by Louis Gallo

...at some point in my twenties: Bloody Marys, "Rhapsody in Blue," oxygen masks, Delta does what it can to erase the memory of the one that sank, splintered and disappeared into Lake Pontchartrain. So…

by Marguerite Kenner

As we roll along on the granite floors of the concourse on our way to Gate 44, I feel a bit hypocritical about the handsome matching luggage my husband and I just bought. If…

by Rose Cook

And so as we take off the cheerful man in the seat next to me, with his giant RAF watch with gold wings for hands and his crowned winged badge in his lapel and…

by Carol Tracy Carr

Fresh out of law school, I was happy to find a job, even though the hours were long, my boss was eccentric, the salary was pitiful, and he offered only one fringe benefit: flying…

by Christopher Schaberg

It was 2002 and I was in the window seat next to a man who had the aisle seat. This was on a Canadair Regional Jet, which has two seats on each side of…

by Pete Olson

We just sat there for a few seconds, peering into the snow and ice crystals dancing straight at us into the windshield, front-lit by the landing lights, total blackness beyond, shaking and rattling in…

by Stephen Rea

I admit it’s ironic. I’m trapped in an airport, the place you go to escape. I’ve been stuck in DFW for eleven hours. Best case scenario, I leave in fifty-five minutes. Worst case scenario,…

by Ander Monson

United Airlines flight 5437, Tucson to Denver, 5:15 a.m. Seat 10D backseat library Not for lending, these volumes, SkyWest magazine, with a feature on “Michigan: Keweenaw Peninsula,” my home whether or not I&

by Denis Robillard

I’m thinking to myself, what am I getting myself into here, folks? When was the last time I really got onto a plane? Surely it’s been over fifteen years now. And here I am…

by Geoff Watkinson

Although I’m surrounded by thousands of people at the Atlanta airport during a layover, it’s a lonely Fourth of July. I call Natalie, a girl I’ve known since I got my driver’s license, who…

by Mike Duggan

Ryanair: Oh where to do I begin, Mr. O'Leary? Your airline appears to be a joke at every passenger’s expense. You're not kidding anyone. On a recent flight back from France, I was once…

by John Goossens

The West Jet plane that had departed Toronto Pearson Airport five hours prior started its descent toward the Vancouver skyline and the snaking Fraser River. At first take, the seemingly shoddy design of the…

by Mallory

I am three days from getting on an airplane. After many months away from my husband and my family, I am finally going home. This is both very exciting and rather terrifying. I've been…

by Gerry Holzman

I did, but I don’t anymore. On a non-stop US Airways flight from JFK to Phoenix, one of my suitcases went missing. Although I’ve been flying for more than 50 years, such a traumatic…

by Sandra Vallie

I could fall the distance between the plane and the ground in a bit more than two minutes. I have no wish to do this, but it’s good to know I can still figure…

by Edward Pinnegar

The sun struggled through the patchy grey sky to glint off the yellow tail fin, on which the logo of a puffin in flight seemed strangely motionless. A bracing wind blew; after three weeks…

by Linda Coburn

My usual modus operandi while waiting for a plane is to find a seat far from the gate and any aisles, away from the eager beavers who jump up the minute they hear the…

by Birdie Jaworski

I made a trip to the Midwest, and flew home from St. Louis in a plane chock full of vacation people. I sat next to a window over the wing, and watched the silver…

by Robert Landon

It is only on overnight flights that I allow myself the luxury of a sleeping pill. Not that I am afraid of flying itself. I rather like it, in fact. However, being tallish, anxiety-prone,…

by Emily Farranto

I used to pass time at the airport. This was before heightened security when you could go unticketed, luggageless and sit in the airport bar or by the big windows and watch the planes…

by Claude Clayton Smith

At the far end of the hall lived a guy whose name I no longer remember, perhaps because I’m repressing it. I’ll call him Moe. Moe was suicidal over a girl who had broken…

by Bart Plantenga

I always try my best to blend in when I’m flying because I’ve always been an easy mark for customs and immigration officials with authority abuse as handy replacement for their self esteem, which…

by Nicole Heaton

I had a lot of apprehension about flying with my infant daughter for the first time. I had boarded many planes in my life, but never with a baby in tow. As the day…

by Catherine Miller

Miranda July wrote in a recent New Yorker that she used to steal her friends’ luggage and then get her friends to put in a false claim for the insurance money. Nice. I mean,…

by SuzAnne Cole

August 16, 2003 Rod Eddington, Chief Executive British Airways Waterside (HCB3) PO Box 365 Harmondsworth UB7 0GB Dear Mr. Eddington: On August 11, 2003, we were aboard BA #2025 from London to Houston. An…

by Ramona Scarborough

I was on a diet...again. So when I got on the airplane in Portland to fly to Sacramento, I brought a salad. When I reached the security checkpoint, the guard said, soberly, "We'll have…

by Anna Vodicka

I once read an in-flight magazine article about businesspeople using airplanes as a vehicle for sales. They’d realized commercial flights were an untapped market, a networking free-for-all with a guaranteed, limite

by Jim Gustafson

So I am flying from Reno to Minneapolis, in the window seat. On my left the man in the middle speaks to the woman knitting In the aisle seat, her nimble fingers move almost…

by Vanessa Junkin

February 28: Pearson International The mellow blue sky slowly grabbed up at the plane, cradled us in its fist. It was early morning and already dissociation had settled into my bones. It was my…

by J. Ryan Williams

On my last trip to Dallas I was seated next to a business traveler who used Virgin Air's onboard wifi to watch YouTube videos of plane crashes throughout the entire flight. J. Ryan…

by William Stobb

As they do to many slightly cautious or even wholly reasonable people, commercial jets seemed unlikely to me—the weight, the velocity, the shape and construction of the craft, the theory of gravity. Maybe in…

by Michael M. Pacheco

Flying from Portland to Las Vegas is a fairly common trip for me and my wife, maybe too common. Earlier this year, we were passing through the metal detectors at PDX when a woman…

by Kristi DeMeester

It was only my second flight, and I hadn’t yet mastered the grace that inevitably comes to the seasoned traveler. The subtle removal of shoes, the flick of the wrist that empties pockets, hands…

by Danielle Susi

May 2010 As our plane ascended, the New York City skyline was a silhouette of pillars, backlit by the rising sun. The sky, a hazy blue-green frosted with clouds. 5:26 a.m. (EST): The first…

by Michael Booth

If the scythe of heaven were to suddenly swing like a pendulum from a point, sing through the atmosphere—unthinking, unblinking—and divide this aluminum tube clean through; and if we were tumbling under the c

by Bobby Smithe

I was twenty-nine, already middle-aged in my mind, and had made my decision. By the time I bought the plane ticket I knew there was no turning back; I was leaving my wife and…

by Bhob Rainey

Leeds had gone well. Pints of improbably fresh Tetley Ale lent some effervescence to the concert, and the hospitality of the show's organizers was top notch. The next stop for Greg and me was…

by Beth McKim

In those days it was as if each of us had been given a daunting assignment: observing and reporting all suspicious people and their activities. This was especially true of those flying on commercial…

by Stewart Sinclair

NoLimits A sleek, glossy pamphlet reads: NoLimits: Southwest Airlines Internship Programs… &nbsp

by Kate Dorhout

I’d been on some long flights before, but the flight from Johannesburg to JFK was the worst flight of my entire life. I had been looking forward to going home; I had spent five…

by Andrei Codrescu

On airplanes you should read Hungarian novels—they are the only reading that flies at the same altitude. I just let Skylark by Deszo Kosztolanyi take me from from Memphis to Boston. Actually, any Austro-Hungarian…

by Ian Bogost

I will fly more than 200,000 miles this year. It routinizes, like an extended commute. The suburbanite knows every moment of the drive: on-ramp, lane-change, morning-show, cup-holder. I'm like that, but on a global…

by Bonnie Price

Looking back, it's bizarre how some of the most mundane afternoons have the potential to be transformed into storytelling magic. That happened to me during my sophomore year of college. I was a nineteen-year-old…

by Kristin Sanders

When I was nineteen and in between my first and second years of college, I took my first and last trip to Las Vegas. I flew with my mom, dad, and sister. My dad…

by Megan Volpert

For several years now, I have seen the sunrise every weekday. My primary instinct is to splash in it like a puddle, to go up into the abstract and two-dimensional ceiling of reality with…

by Dawn Corrigan

Like messages from an entrepreneurial God, banners unfurled across our sky each summer day at the Jersey shore, proclaiming unportentous facts like BLEEKERS BUFFET - ALL YOU CAN EAT 8.99 or SAFE & FAST…

by Connie Porter

Reading The New York Times this past August, I was drawn to the headline, “With Hair Pat Downs, Complaints Of Racial Bias.” Two African-American women, Timery Shante Nance and Laura Adele, were both stopped…

by Anastasia Nicole Simon

I was raised Catholic so I carry several coin sized medals in my wallet depicting saints, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ, more like a superstitious child carries a rabbit foot than as a…

by Roz Warren

I always request a seat assignment when I make a plane reservation. If you wait till you get to the airport, you’re liable to wind up squeezed into a middle seat between a morbidly…

by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

You book your own flights. You don’t have a fancy assistant who does these sorts of things. You are scheduled to read your poetry at a conference in Montreal in April. You are leaving…

by Gabriel Tolliver

An obscure Rolling Stones song started to play in my mental iPod—every soldier has their theme music! We moved in a lazy, single-file way down the tarmac toward the “Bird” at Pope AFB. A…

by Josh Lefkowitz

Memorial Day weekend. I'm on my way to North Carolina to visit my bro and his wife and their two kids, my three-year-old niece and the newborn boy. I can't wait…

by Thomas Gibbs, MD

I was flying back from my mother-in-law’s funeral. My wife had stayed behind. Finishing a Heineken and ready to order another, I noticed the man in front of me jerk his right arm out…

by Christopher Citro

Here I am in an airport again, waiting for a delayed plane to take me back home to Kansas from my trip to Ohio for the holidays, a stale Caesar salad turning sour in…

by Ramona Scarborough

I almost missed my connecting flight to Omaha due to a delay at the Portland airport. Quickly seating myself, I noticed a large, swarthy turbaned man searching for an empty place to sit. People…

by Michelle Auerbach

All the planes have been used on someone else. All the overhead bins are full. All the seats have been taken. All the coy mistresses, the fleas, the arms and legs in an…

by Hal Sirowitz

I was on a flight from New York to Pittsburgh. All of a sudden the pilot got on the loudspeaker telling us that we’re going to make an emergency landing in Harrisburg, Pennslyvania. He…

by Brenda Bellinger

Seat belts buckled, tray tables raised, we nosed down into gray and white cotton candy. In sunlight and shadow, forty shades of green rose to greet us. Landing gear rumbled into place, seemingly too…

by Allyson Goldin Loomis

Before I get on an airplane, I prepare to die. My terror cannot be assuaged by anyone’s quoting safety statistics, the laws of physics, or the training regimens of commercial airline pilots. I cannot…

by Michael M. Pacheco

After boarding in Portland I settled in for a relatively short flight to Phoenix. For a while I thought no one was going to occupy the seat to my right, but at the last…

by Michael Howarth

It’s only during the past ten years that I’ve developed an intense fear of flying. I do realize that my chances of dying in a plane crash are about one in eleven million, and…

by Steve Newton

I had just flown from NYC to Denver and there was a layover of a couple of hours before I was to catch a flight for Salt Lake City. This was a time that…

by Susan Perl

There was this one time I flew from Detroit to Miami and back to Detroit in one day. I won't say what I was doing. It wasn't exactly illicit, but don't tell my husband.…

by Meredith Pond

About 45 minutes into our flight from Dallas to Cabo San Lucas, we hear the captain say, “Nothing to worry about folks, but we're making a landing in El Paso—a little emergency.” My daughter…

by Lauren Frederick

I haven't been on many flights in my life. My preferred method of travel is by boat, then by car, then by bike, then by hot air balloon, horseback, and huskie-drawn sleds (those are…

by Cynthia Bargar

Sleeping bagels tucked into brown paper beds and free Boston Globes and Wall Street Journals greeted us. I chose Globe with its smoky volcanic Icelandic ash smothering Europe, halting air travel. We shuttled smug…

by Tony D'Souza

My mother worked reservations at United Airlines in Chicago before all those jobs were sent to India, and not having any clue how fortunate I was, I grew up on planes. I have no…

by Cat Pleska

It happens many times a year: flights more resembling a roller coaster than a smooth glide at 30,000 feet. But while many like roller coasters, screaming into the wind at 500 miles an hour…

by Harold Jaffe

Vodka A man swallowed a liter of top-shelf brand vodka rather than surrender it to airport personnel (who themselves would drink it after hours). New regulations designed to obstruct terrorism (which the US has…

by Simeon Hunter

Airports are a special kind of space. Architecturally they may be, like churches and fire stations, iconoclastic, singular, without reference to their context. Which is good because a context is one of the things…

by Kerry Cullen

I shove and shuffle inside the hulk of metal. I’m a cross-country college student, so these moments are familiar to me and I’m aware of their peaks: The moment when I open the overhead…

by Joseph Kavanaugh

I fly a lot for business—sales. I fly so much it feels like commuting. The flight attendants all know me by first name. They know my wife’s name, our kids’ names, the dog’s name.…

by Diego Báez

Miami International is such a piece of shit. It’s like nothing ever ends: terminals devour runways, runways birth terminals, everything always under construction. There’s never been a greater delay and pain i

by Maria Pinheiro

There are, in my opinion, two types of people in this world: those who enjoy flying in planes, and those who would rather embark on a long and arduous 27-hour train ride than strap…

by Marit MacArthur

As if the view out the window were not abstract enough, lakes as pocket mirrors, mountains as sugar-dusted alligator spines, tiny towns as constellations, cities as circuitry, we watch the screens on the seat…

by Robert Ben Garant

One of the scariest things I've seen since 9/11 actually happened on the ground. At the airport in Cleveland. Waiting between flights, I wandered around the airport, killing time. I wandered into a downstairs…

by Jon Bonkoski

Having been lulled to sleep by the droning whir of the turbo prop, I awoke to the yammering of the woman sitting behind me. I realized she had been talking the entire flight. Like…

by Jennifer Kowalski

Okay, it wasn’t really a play date; it was just my son and me. And it wasn’t weird, like that time a few years ago when one of my friends wanted me to go…

by Matthew Guenette

This happened at Logan Airport, at the check-in. My younger brother was standing behind me. The woman at the counter asked if I had been, “in control of my bag all day.” Before I…

by Patricia Colleen Murphy

If you want to know for certain your father loves you, take his large wingspan hand into your delicate one. Remember how he pointed to each word as he read to you from Kipling.…

by Andrew Maxwell

It is hard not to ponder the prominent ‘spoils of war’ displays that are arranged in shadowboxes at major security checkpoints. First I wonder who was flying where with a full sized medieval replica…

by Greg Keeler

Delta had just absorbed Northwest and I didn't know which gate to check in at when I was returning home from D.C. a couple of summers ago, so I went to Delta. The desk…

by J. Ryan Williams

today at the airport: -> 7 days no sex makes one weak ughhhhh ready for my hubby to touchdown he mite get it in the car at the airport im so needy rite now#dntjdgme…

by Jim Courtad

It was a flight from Detroit to Austin with a stop at Houston Intercontinental Airport. My wife had a conference in Austin (where we lived for 6 years) and I was along for the…