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…
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Afterimage
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.
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Points of departure
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.…
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