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 Gail Brady

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

by Jade Arvizu

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

by Stewart Sinclair

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

by Julian Hanna

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

by 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Kurt Mullen

One thing nice about space is it keeps going.

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 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 Bárbara Sorger

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

by 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 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 May Todd

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

by Jourdyn McClain

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

by 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Mike Duggan

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

by 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 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 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…