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 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 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 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 KT Thompson

When the airplane crashed in the meadow, I was on a walk to look for birds. My torso a crosshatch of straps: binoculars, camera, sling with water and treats for my dog, the leash.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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…