Thoughts from an Airplane

Written on my way back to Macau from Singapore. Clearly, I’ve been spending too much time in airplane cabins lately…

Why is it that so much thinking gets done on an airplane? There’s something about being thousands of feet above the earth that really gets the mind racing as fast as the giant vessel you’re in.

I keep wondering what the great minds of history would say if you told them that mankind would one day soar above the clouds, miles higher than any bird they’d ever seen. Would Leonardo di Vinci believe his bizarre invention could have taken us so far? Would Homer admonish us for trying to succeed where Icarus failed?

Perhaps Henry Wadsworth Longfellow saw his fellows constructing early dirigibles and gliders and wrote, “The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.”

How has our technology come so far that we can slap together metal slabs with some bolts and make it fly? What happens when the tiniest thing goes wrong? A plastic window falls out and the pressure from the altitude makes our brains implode? Part of the wing snaps of from going too fast and we plunge to our deaths in the middle of the ocean, our bodies and vessel never to be found, and we become one of the many mysterious legends of the Bermuda Triangle?

I’m surprised stuff like this doesn’t happen more often. I’m sure modern engineering could explain it, but I rather enjoy the whimsical mystery of it all.

But all of this danger is worth it to see this view. A small, plastic window into what mankind could only dream about for thousands of years. What did early man imagine lay above the clouds, in the sky?

I know what they could only wonder. An expansive blue sea of white smoke, so vast there is no discernable horizon. The sky is the sea and the airplane a ship, floating in white, cloudy waters. The sunset surrounds you in colors of pure pink and lavender, stretching endlessly in either direction toward the ends of the universe.

But this magical sunset view is short-lived as you hurdle hundreds of miles an hour through different time zones. What normally takes an hour or so only lasts minutes, as if you’re watching one of natures’ most spectacular phenomenon on fast-forward.

And then dark night engulfs you, like the storm clouds rolling in over the sea. Turbulence rocks your ship in the raging sea; Poseidon is envious that you are outside his powerful influence. Flashes of lightning illuminate pieces of foggy cloud below you.

Rather than feel fear of straying too close to another one of Zeus’s passionate rages, you take comfort in flying far above such earthly realities.