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 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 Alina Stefanescu

SCENARIO A young pregnant female stands in the security line at Birmingham International Airport. She works at a DC nonprofit but flies back to Alabama for ob-gyn appointments. The wedding ring is missing. RISK…

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 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 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 Nathan C. Martin

I remember passing a Nalgene bottle—a popular outdoor accoutrement in the West—full of Red Bull and vodka around the car on the way to Salt Lake City International Airport. My 19-year-old girlfriend and I…

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 Kevin Haworth

We will not cross paths with the bodies. We are due at Ben Gurion airport in just a few hours, and we are deep into the final busy-ness of moving out of our Tel…

by Anita Breland

My first impressions of India are also nearly my last. I have arrived in Mumbai on a sultry January evening, after an eight-hour flight from wintry Zurich. En route, I daydreamed of temple processions,…

by Anca L. Szilágyi

I’m a firm believer in write-what-you-desperately-want-to-know. Research, empathize, repeat. It’s not impossible to write beyond your own experience or beyond your own precise demographic. But it is a risk. I

by Lisa McKenzie

I don’t remember the airport and I don’t remember the year, but I’ll never forget the poor able-bodied soul who exited the handicapped stall to find a line of five wheelchairs and five attendants…

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 Jeff Hawthorne

Passing through TSA security checkpoints has become like a Stanley Kubrick film, with partially clothed adults meeting randomly for moody conversation and dark rituals. People under the age of 18 really should have their

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 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 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 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 Simone Ashby

It was 1996 and I was at the end of a two-week holiday in Malaysia from my teaching job in Korea. My employer had asked with no trace of humor that I return to…

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 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 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 Anna Leahy & Douglas Dechow

For several years, we lived in Galesburg, Illinois, a town with a small airport, a place we’d swing by, trying to catch sight of a takeoff or landing. Once, we saw a shiny silver…

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 Michael Cornelius

I was in my last year of graduate school, and I was flying home for the holidays. It was Christmas Eve, and I’d just managed to finish my last assignment and hand in my…

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Ander Monson

United Airlines flight 5437, Tucson to Denver, 5:15 a.m. Seat 10D backseat library Not for lending, these volumes, SkyWest magazine, with a feature on “Michigan: Keweenaw Peninsula,” my home whether or not I&

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 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 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 Connie Porter

Reading The New York Times this past August, I was drawn to the headline, “With Hair Pat Downs, Complaints Of Racial Bias.” Two African-American women, Timery Shante Nance and Laura Adele, were both stopped…

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 Tony D'Souza

My mother worked reservations at United Airlines in Chicago before all those jobs were sent to India, and not having any clue how fortunate I was, I grew up on planes. I have no…

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 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 Greg Keeler

Delta had just absorbed Northwest and I didn't know which gate to check in at when I was returning home from D.C. a couple of summers ago, so I went to Delta. The desk…