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 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 Damari Esqueda

I remember only two things from the first time I rode in an airplane. One: my mom took two dramamine that knocked her out, a precaution so her eardrums wouldn't pop. And two: the…

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 Barrie Cole

I was on a plane once a long time ago, and the woman sitting next to me had never been on a plane before. She was young, perhaps nineteen or so, and she explained…

by Yvonne Osborne

He was slim and well-dressed with a nice haircut, not too short, not too long. He wore a black tailored jacket and well-made jeans. His black leather shoes showed no sign of the slush…

by Jason Weiss

What could be more peculiar than flying in an airplane? No matter how many hundreds of times we’ve joined the procession to file into that big metal tube, no matter how used to it…

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 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 Peter Bracking

I am a space-race child. I was an Elroy. From a very young age I was aware of the sky. The television and radio were filled with spacecraft and astronauts seeking unknown planets. I…

by Lara Lillibridge

When you fly at a thousand feet, you see the world differently. Commercial planes fly at an anonymous altitude, so far up that houses become invisible. General aviation flies lower. We are able to…

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 Giulianna Di Nenna

Life-searching questions arise at night, after sunset, and not just on park benches along river banks. Watching rushing water, reflecting upon its cleansing qualities, can soothe. If only I could have been near a…

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 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 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 Lydia Buchanan

I could tell you about the time that my family and I had to make an emergency landing in Colorado, amidst silver-suited firefighters and then had to suffer through a series of flights back…

by Phyllis McKinley

“You go first, Nana, to break a path.” These are my instructions from six-year-old Josh. I plunk onto a sled in the sub-zero Canadian air with eight-year-old Rachel bundled in front of me. Off…

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 Fargo Kantrowitz

I remember the snow. I wasn't brought up on snow back in the deserts of Las Vegas, but in Boston they had a lot of it. I remember it sitting in the giant push-back…

by Jacqueline Jules

Dragging my portable closet on wheels I follow a line of tense travelers whining over boarding delays and tight overhead bins until reaching my slender vinyl spot designed to double as a floatation device.…