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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Kurt Mullen

One thing nice about space is it keeps 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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…