The Miracle (Yes, That’s Right, I Said Miracle) of Air Travel

Quite often today you will hear cats voicing their grievances with the litany of hassles that have infected the process of air travel of late. Many of these objections are perfectly valid. True, the lines can be long. The forced removal of the footgear is annoying, but it is certainly not catastrophic. And the bagging of the gels and liquids is just one more nuisance that conspires to make the entire endeavor an enormous pain in the ass. These things are easy to focus on.

However, I prefer to focus on the sunnier side of the coin. And that merely requires remembering that air travel is a miracle. Yes, a miracle. Like all technologies, it quickly becomes so commonplace that we all-too-easily forget how amazing it truly is. This past Memorial Day, I winged my way across half of the continental United States to attend my brother’s nuptial festivities in Nebraska. I woke up in Washington, and went to sleep in Omaha, more than a thousand miles away. Distances that once took weeks or months to cover are now reduced to a few hours of travel time. A visit from New York to Richmond in the eighteenth century would have required weeks of time to be set aside, thus precluding the voyage for all but a handful.

Not only is this mind-bogglingly awesome technology available to us, but it is remarkably cheap as well. Not only can I go visit someone who lives a thousand miles away for the weekend, but I can do it for less than $200. Wow. Many of my friends, who could not be considered wealthy by the standards of an industrialized democracy, are fantastically well-traveled. Indonesia, Croatia, South Africa, Belize, Chile and dozens of other nations are a few hundred dollars and a few hours of time away. The world is open before us. And most of the time we take this for granted. We assume it has always been thus.

I cannot minimize the really unfortunate things involved in air travel, such as the enormous amount of gas burned by planes, or worse still, the efforts of intolerant old men to persuade impressionable young men that airplanes are an appropriate setting for indiscriminate mayhem. The many small irritants that collectively cause such trouble are real and irritating. But the next time you have to pay too much for long-term parking, or a flight gets delayed, or you have to get up at 6 AM to go stand in line for an hour before you even get to hear the whir of a jet engine, try and perk yourself up. You are utilizing an astonishing invention indeed. The fact that it is so prosaic that we forget this only makes it that much more miraculous.