There was a time when I actually enjoyed air travel. Even after September 2001, when I started needing two or three drinks before and after I got on the bird, it still wasn’t the worst thing. There was the excitement of jetBlue, after all, and besides I had to fly if I wanted to go to California to see my girl every now and then. It was manageable.
Not anymore. Having just returned home from yet another two-legged flight through a hub, I have come to some realizations, and they are as follows:
* There are no good hubs. Chicago gets blizzards, Houston gets hurricanes, Denver gets ice and weird atmospherics because there’s not enough air up there, and Atlanta is, well, Atlanta. When I was back and forth from Dulles to the Bay, it was eminently manageable because it was a direct flight. But if I have to change planes and go up and down twice, that’s too much.
* Flying has become like everything else: as long as you have tons of money, it’s no problem. You can buy your way out of bag limits, you can buy your way out of the ritual goosing by the TSA, you can buy your way to the front of the line to board, you can buy your way into human-sized seating accommodations. And you have to, because almost everything is monetized now. You actually have to pay to sit in the exit row, for crying out loud – I suspect it’s only a matter of time before they say that they’re out of overhead space, so you’ll need to check your remaining carry-on bags, and whip out a credit card reader so you can pay for not having the foresight to realize that there’s never enough carry-on space overhead.
* There is no non-dickish way to put your seat back. And as soon as you are a dick and put your seat back, I literally can’t reach into the seatback pocket any longer. To the douche with the puberty-stache and his ditz girlfriend with her Louis Vuitton bag who couldn’t wait until we stopped climbing to put your head in my lap: I hope you give each other herpes.
* You don’t go aboard the Embraer Regional Jet, you put it on like a jacket. Nevertheless, that tiny little thing is a superior flying experience to an overstuffed 737. It’s impossible not to feel like you’re being cattle-hauled. Southwest is worse. This is one time where fascism really works: work out the boarding formula, issue a number based on seating, and line up and board as you’re told.
* There’s not a lot of premium for being a competent flyer. You’re going to be stuck with all the amateur hour people who only ever fly on alternate holidays annually, which is why I won’t fly at the holidays anymore. If you had to pass some sort of test on “am I capable of being a civilized passenger” and could then fly exclusively on Virgin America and it would go where you needed it to, life would be amazing.
* The smartphone was the worst thing ever to happen to flying, because now people think that it’s a Stalinist-level government oppression to be made to turn the phone off. The whole “turn your phone on once we’re taxiing on the ground so you can call for your pickup in this post-9/11 no-meeting-at-the-gate world” has been transformed by the iPhone. Now the aforementioned douchebag can be checking his Instagram before the wheels even hit the ground. It even appears the FAA is on the verge of shrugging and letting all non-transmitting electronics run wide open all flight. Not that it’ll be enough for people who just have to be allowed to talk and text in the middle of takeoff. The closest I ever came to a legit air-rage event was in 2002 or 2003 when the woman behind me was still talking on her phone as the engines roared up to 100% and we started speeding up to take off; had I not been strapped in I’m sure I would have attempted to seize and smash the phone.
In short, flying has become a concentrated dose of everything that’s wrong with living in America in the 21st century. No wonder it’s gotten to be too much to bear. At this point, unless physically impossible – think Hawaii or London or Tokyo – I will take the train over the plane 100% of the time, given the time and opportunity. But that would mean taking rail seriously, which hasn’t happened outside the Northeast since the 20th Century Limited went out of service…