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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.…