SOME THOUGHTS ON FLYING

In airplanes, that is. Took a trip to Greensboro, NC on business earlier this week; flights up were good(thanks Delta); flights back were hell(thanks U.S.Air). But this flying brought some thoughts to mind.


Starting out with the trip to the airport, from driveway to parking space was exactly 53.6 miles. Oddly enough, I pulled intop said parking space at exactly 5:36. Weird, huh?

So now they load planes by something called 'zones' (a great Hawkwind album by the way) which apparently are just random groups of people seated in random seats all through the plane, which backs up the line into the entry tunnel. Makes no sense, compared to the old way of loading the plane from the back to the front, which caused less trouble since people had a smaller chance of being in each others way, and I'd bet was faster.

So then they give you pre-flight instructions on seatbelts, as if it was a 21st century invention!

Now, I can remember riding in cars as a kid where there were no seatbelts in the back, so back in the day, seatbelt instructions were probably helpful. But I should think in this day and age that anybody who can afford to fly probably at least knows what seatbelts are and how to use them.

Which reminds me of another old tradition (like getting actual food on the plane) that seems to have fallen by the wayside. I remember when flying as a kid, whenever the pilot would land the plane smoothly, the passengers would clap. Yeah, really. Of course, judging by my last trip, out of 4 landings, there was only one I would have clapped for, and one was downright crappy!



Though as my Dad used to say, "Any landing you walk away from is a good landing", and since hew was in the R.C.A.F. (though not a pilot)during WWII, I guess he'd know.



As for me, you couldn't pay me enough to fly U.S. Airways, no matter how patriotic-sounding their name is...