Airborne Musings

(Written aboard a flight to Belize in January 2010)

I’m writing this on a flight to Belize out of Miami that I almost missed. I thought for sure seven hours ago I’d have missed the first leg of this journey out of Boston by being stuck in a typical Boston traffic jam which, combined with a driving rain that a descending rain/snow line turned the former into the latter the closer we inched toward Logan Airport, meant I just boarded my 8:25 a.m. flight in time only to sit for the next one hour and 20 minutes waiting for the de-icers to show up followed by waiting for the push-back dudes to show up with their push-back gear.

So then I’m in the air trying to calculate how much effort it would take to make my 1:50 p.m. Belize flight out of Miami if we’re not landing until 1:20. A lot, it turns out, the thought of which made an unreachable knot between my shoulder blades feel like someone boiled a golf ball in nuclear waste and then pounded it into my spine with a nine iron.

So we land in Miami and I hump it over from terminal E to terminal D, and my gate is not D-1, or D-2, or D-3 or anything in the low, merciful range. No, my flight to Belize leaves from D-51 – 51!!! – Absolutely the last gate in the terminal.

So I huff and puff and walk fast and gasp through the 20s, pant through the 30s, start realizing why they call these things a “terminal” as my chest aches through the 30s. Then in the mid-40s, bearing down the homestretch, sweaty, hauling one laptop/camera bag on my shoulder, a small but very tightly packed soft bag in the other, I hear the PA system boom with not my flight number and reasonable request to board, but “Will passenger Paul Kandarian please report to gate D-51. This is the last call.”

So now I break a full trot that leads into a canter and then a full-out gallop (as much so as my 56-year-body will allow, anyway) and my fast walk huff-and-puff turns into a defibrillator-needed pounding-the-ground. Breathlessly I make the gate and the agent says, “Oh, there you are,” like a disappointed hostess awaiting the guy running late with the crab dip.

So we take off on time and as my breathing has just returned to normal, I have my usual mid-air weird thoughts because what else is there to do, I can’t read comfortably on an airplane and I certainly can’t sleep with this golf ball throbbing like a cheap romance novel between my shoulder blades, so I wonder things like:

--Why can’t we use cell phones in flight? Will the plane blow up if we send a text, check our email, download an app? Is it that dangerous a proposition? If it were, don’t you think they wouldn’t even let us bring them aboard in the first place? I mean, really, do they trust us that much? This is an industry that doesn’t trust us to carry more than 3 ounces of liquid in one bottle, for Chrissakes.

And really, how dangerous can it be? Every time there’s a chance of an airline disaster, or worse, a real one, don’t people always turn their cells on and call home for the last time? And are you, like me, really pissed when the news stations play those recorded messages of people who’ve called and couldn’t reach their loved ones?

--How come you can use your cell phone after landing but no electronic device? And what the hell qualifies as an electronic device? Isn’t a cell phone an electronic device? What happens if you do use an electronic device? The plane flips into a ditch?

--It is absolutely guaranteed the more of a hurry you’re in to leave plane 1 to rush to plane 2, the further back of plane 1 your seat will be and the larger and slower the enormous, plodding woman in front of you will be and the gate at which plane 2 is located is the dead last one of that terminal.

--When the price of fuel skyrocketed, airplanes started charging for bags. When the price of fuel dropped, the charge for bags did not. Interesting. And you still can’t get a bag of salted dust (technically pretzels, but we know better) for free on flights anymore where pretty soon during the safety demonstration, they’ll say “before you put on your oxygen mask, swipe your credit card through the device attached to it to start the flow of oxygen. Sorry, we do not accept cash.”