Boarding Flight Quotes

Every woman that finally figured out her worth, has picked up her suitcases of pride and boarded a flight to freedom, which landed in the valley of change.

     Illicit flight Alfa Bravo Charlie quickly reached a predetermined altitude and stopped dead. The passengers on board screamed the way people do on fairground rides. The shuttle hesitated momentarily and then shot forward accelerating rapidly to reach a blistering 145,222 miles per hour. They were in a Mach 22 situation. The cries from on-board could not be heard from the ground. Neither did anyone in the great metropolis of Llar witness the bright blue vapour trail the craft left behind in its wake. It was after all overcast and raining heavily.

Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat-belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed.

     ‘The onboard computer just wants to say a few words before we leave.’      The speakers in the cabin crackled into life. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome you on-board the presidential shuttle for tonight’s illicit flight, Alfa Bravo Charlie. I would just like to say it’s a pleasure to meet you all and thank you so much for coming here tonight to steal me. To be honest I don’t get out much these days so this is something of a special occasion.’      ‘It will be for us too if we get caught,’ Semilla said sardonically.

The only controls available to those on board were two push-buttons on the center post of the cabin -- one labeled on and one labeled off. The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of the Martian mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off.

You'll be boarding the nine twenty-one commercial flight as Shirley and Roderick Cliphorn." "Roderick Cliphorn?" Dan groaned. Only someone with a name like Sinead Starling would have considered that normal.

In space flight, “attitude” refers to orientation: which direction your vehicle is pointing relative to the Sun, Earth and other spacecraft. If you lose control of your attitude, two things happen: the vehicle starts to tumble and spin, disorienting everyone on board, and it also strays from its course, which, if you’re short on time or fuel, could mean the difference between life and death. In the Soyuz, for example, we use every cue from every available source—periscope, multiple sensors, the horizon—to monitor our attitude constantly and adjust if necessary. We never want to lose attitude, since maintaining attitude is fundamental to success. In my experience, something similar is true on Earth. Ultimately, I don’t determine whether I arrive at the desired professional destination. Too many variables are out of my control. There’s really just one thing I can control: my attitude during the journey, which is what keeps me feeling steady and stable, and what keeps me headed in the right direction. So I consciously monitor and correct, if necessary, because losing attitude would be far worse than not achieving my goal.

Flight 2039 to Boston is now boarding at gate 14A," a voice announced over the PA system. Nellie sighed. "I love Irish accents." She paused. "And Australian accents. And English accents." A dreamy look came over her face. "Theo had an awesome accent." Dan snorted. "Yeah, there was just that one tiny problem. He turned out to be a two-timing, backstabbing thief.

After a bad trip, don't carry your luggage on board the next flight. Stay grounded til you figure out a new way to travel.

I biked over to my dad's flat and emotionally blackmailed him into lending me enough cash to leave the country. On that trip I learnt something very inmortant. Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment i boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat-belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed.

Air travel reminds us who we are. It’s the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don’t understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.

History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagaras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.

Is he drunk?' the attendant asked as they boarded the early morning flight. 'Not yet,' said Grey.

Is it very different at home, or on the street, or waiting at the gate to board a flight? I maintain myself on the puppet drug of personal technology. Every touch of a button brings the neural rush of finding something I never knew and never needed to know until it appears at my anxious fingertips, where it remains for a shaky second before disappearing forever.

Now boarding flight 266." "That's you." Kyle whispered into her hair. On that note, she gave him one last squeeze and broke their embrace. She took off her glasses folded them up in her hand and looked him straight in the eyes. "Goodbye Kyle." A heartbreaking finality rang in her tone. "Goodbye Jessie.

On that trip I learnt something very important. Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat-belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed." (The Beach)

Oh no. Oh, hell no. Merciful God above. Jake looked around for Aileen, his latest conquest and plus one for the engagement party for his brother Travis. "Yes, I need only a one-way ticket," Grandma announced loudly to the Alaska Airlines clerk at the kiosk. Jake watched with a mixture of horror and panic as his grandmother bought a ticket on the same flight as him. please let her credit card be declined; please, please. "Here you go!" The evil lady handed over a boarding pass and smiled at Grandma

It was only later, after he boarded the direct flight back to Narita and had buckled his seat belt, that the words came, the words he should have said. The right words always seemed to come too late.

The worst thing that happened to air travel in the past ten years was the bankruptcy of Xhibit Corp., the parent company of SkyMall. I recalled with clarity the first time I boarded a flight and it was missing from all usual nooks and crannies. It had been a dark day.

She waited for her flight. She loved him, she loved him. Love is the world, pain is the world. She was in it now, she was boarding, there was nowhere to hide.

When it was time to board my flight, I took one last glance back. I knew that I had everything with me so it was not a "make sure I have everything" glance. It was more like a parting glance to Philadelphia, my home, America- for I would not be coming back for ten months. (Ch 5- Twenty in Paris)

If armed terrorists had tried to hijack any of the flights I’ve been on lately, we passengers would have swiftly beaten them to death with those hard rolls you get with your in-flight meal. Funny, isn’t it? The airlines go to all that trouble to keep you from taking a gun on board, then they just hand you a dinner toll you could kill a musk ox with.

Don't search for answers. I felt like I was always searching. Literally -- when I felt depressed I'd wander online, pressing links, looking for something that would make me feel better. I'd surf from friends' photos to strangers' blog posts about how to apply makeup, to the flight message board, to Googling Will for the hundredth time--and feel worse.

A final depressing point about inequality and violence. As we’ve seen, a rat being shocked activates a stress response. But a rat being shocked who can then bite the hell out of another rat has less of a stress response. Likewise with baboons—if you are low ranking, a reliable way to reduce glucocorticoid secretion is to displace aggression onto those even lower in the pecking order. It’s something similar here—despite the conservative nightmare of class warfare, of the poor rising up to slaughter the wealthy, when inequality fuels violence, it is mostly the poor preying on the poor. This point is made with a great metaphor for the consequences of societal inequality.41 The frequency of “air rage”—a passenger majorly, disruptively, dangerously losing it over something on a flight—has been increasing. Turns out there’s a substantial predictor of it: if the plane has a first-class section, there’s almost a fourfold increase in the odds of a coach passenger having air rage. Force coach passengers to walk through first class when boarding, and you more than double the chances further. Nothing like starting a flight by being reminded of where you fit into the class hierarchy. And completing the parallel with violent crime, when air rage is boosted in coach by reminders of inequality, the result is not a crazed coach passenger sprinting into first class to shout Marxist slogans. It’s the guy being awful to the old woman sitting next to him, or to the flight attendant.*

There once was a man who went to see a psychiatrist, crippled by a fear of flying. His phobia was based on the belief that there would be a bomb on any plane he boarded. The psychiatrist tried to shift the phobia but couldn‘t, so he sent his patient to a statistician. The statistician prodded a calculator and informed the man that the odds against there being a bomb on board the next flight he took were half a million to one. The man still wasn’t happy, and sat there convinced that he’d be on that one plane out of half a million. So the statistician prodded the calculator again and said ‘all right, would you feel safer if the odds were ten million to one against?’ The man said, yes, of course he would. So the statistician said ‘the odds against there being two, separate, unrelated bombs on board your next flight are exactly ten million to one against.’ The man looked puzzled, and said ‘that’s all well and good, but how does it help me?’ The statistician replied: ‘It’s very simple. You take a bomb on board with you.

We Are All a Part of God "Recently I was sitting in an airport lounge full of people waiting to board a flight. For a few moments my eyes were opened, and I saw how each person was full of His presence, how there was nothing other than He, His light, His love, His beauty. And in the same few moments I also saw that these people did not know it. In this experience I realized that the real mystery is not that we are all divine, are filled with His substance, but that we do not know it. We do not know that we are a part of God. This experience filled me with wonder, the wonder that part of the mystery of creation is that we have been allowed to forget Him. It is His will that in us He forgets Himself, just as it is His will that He allows us to remember Him." — The Circle of Love

Everything is amazing right now and nobody’s happy. Like, in my lifetime the changes in the world have been incredible… Flying is the worst because people come back from flights and they tell you…a horror story…They’re like: “It was the worst day of my life. First of all, we didn’t board for twenty minutes, and then we get on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway…” Oh really, what happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight you non-contributing zero?! You’re flying! It’s amazing! Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going: “Oh my God! Wow!” You’re flying! You’re sitting in a chair, in the sky!

When I asked a classmate for a rubber, you call them erasers, everyone laughed so hard that I was ready to board a flight straight back to London

Richard Reid, the would-be ‘shoe bomber’, had been tackled and subdued on board a flight from Paris to Miami, thereby initiating the era of compulsory shoe-checking for all travellers.

I can’t help but turn around and watch her in shock. Her round hips sway, taking up more space than the other flight attendants I’ve seen on board, but her little pencil skirt dips in at the waist.

In space flight, “attitude” refers to orientation: which direction your vehicle is pointing relative to the Sun, Earth and other spacecraft. If you lose control of your attitude, two things happen: the vehicle starts to tumble and spin, disorienting everyone on board, and it also strays from its course, which, if you’re short on time or fuel, could mean the difference between life and death. In the Soyuz, for example, we use every cue from every available source—periscope, multiple sensors, the horizon—to monitor our attitude constantly and adjust if necessary. We never want to lose attitude, since maintaining attitude is fundamental to success. In my experience, something similar is true on Earth. Ultimately, I don’t determine whether I arrive at the desired professional destination. Too many variables are out of my control. There’s really just one thing I can control: my attitude during the journey, which is what keeps me feeling steady and stable, and what keeps me headed in the right direction. So I consciously monitor and correct, if necessary, because losing attitude would be far worse than not achieving my goal.

Are u at the airport yet? Yep. They pushed my flight back to 3 so I’m going to be sitting here awhile. That sux. What r u gonna do? Gonna hit the food court. Gonna hit it so hard it CRIES. Mom got the bike going. She’s out riding around. She wearing her helmet? Yes. I made her. Coat too. Good for you. That coat adds +5 to all armor rolls. LOL. I love u. Have a safe flight. If I die in a plane crash remember to always bag and board your comics. Love you too.

Then I remembered the "Chip," a small experimental board we had built with footstraps, and thought "it's dumb not to use this for jumping." That's when I first started jumping with footstraps and discovering controlled flight. I could go so much faster

I have begun to sense that living always in search of a new triumph or adventure, spending each morning run fantasizing about the moment when I'll accept the award or board the flight to Singapore or say Well, Terry, thanks so much for having me, means living in perpetual, haphazard evasion of the ordinary.

I wanted to board the plane with you, to show our boarding passes to the flight attendant together, sit side by side and talk until I put my head on your shoulder as you read and slept, and then wake up to together and listen to music, watch a movie, go to the bathroom… Maybe we’d fall asleep again then wake up to another meal only slightly more appetising than the first and watch the shifting cloud formations outside the window together, and hear the captain announcing that we were about to land in Hong Kong, about to land in Malaysia, about to land in Paris… Do I think too much? All I really want is to fly with you.

They are more than travel hubs: this is a special category of city-state, with a stable location, but citizens in flux.They are airport-republics...(a)n example of an extroverted system,where the constitution is spelled out on every ticket, and where one's boarding pass is one's only identification as a citizen.

Some guns were fired to give notice that the departure of the balloon was near. ... Means were used, I am told, to prevent the great balloon's rising so high as might endanger its bursting. Several bags of sand were taken on board before the cord that held it down was cut, and the whole weight being then too much to be lifted, such a quantity was discharged as would permit its rising slowly. Thus it would sooner arrive at that region where it would be in equilibrio with the surrounding air, and by discharging more sand afterwards, it might go higher if desired. Between one and two o'clock, all eyes were gratified with seeing it rise majestically from above the trees, and ascend gradually above the buildings, a most beautiful spectacle. When it was about two hundred feet high, the brave adventurers held out and waved a little white pennant, on both sides of their car, to salute the spectators, who returned loud claps of applause. The wind was very little, so that the object though moving to the northward, continued long in view; and it was a great while before the admiring people began to disperse. The persons embarked were Mr. Charles, professor of experimental philosophy, and a zealous promoter of that science; and one of the Messrs Robert, the very ingenious constructors of the machine. {While U.S. ambassador to France, writing about witnessing, from his carriage outside the garden of Tuileries, Paris, the first manned balloon ascent using hydrogen gas by Jacques Charles on the afternoon of 1 Dec 1783. A few days earlier, he had watched the first manned ascent in Montgolfier's hot-air balloon, on 21 Nov 1783.}

I'm jittery.It's like the animatronic band from Chuck E. Cheese is throwing a jamboree in my stomach. I've always hated Chuck E. Cheese. Why am I thinking about Chuck E. Cheese? I don't know why I'm nervous.I'm just seeing my mom again. And Seany.And Bridge! Bridge said she'd come. St. Clair's connecting flight to San Francisco doesn't leave for another three hours,so we board the train that runs between terminals,and he walks me to the arrivals area.We've been quiet since we got off the plane. I guess we're tired. We reach the security checkpoint,and he can't go any farther. Stupid TSA regulations.I wish I could introduce him to my family.The Chuck E. Cheese band kicks it up a notch,which is weird, because I'm not nervous about leaving him. I'll see him again in two weeks. "All right,Banana.Suppose this is goodbye." He grips the straps of his backpack,and I do the same. This is the moment we're supposed to hug. For some reason,I can't do it. "Tell your mom hi for me. I mean, I know I don't know her. She just sounds really nice. And I hope she's okay." He smiles softly. "Thanks.I'll tell her." "Call me?" "Yeah,whatever. You'll be so busy with Bridge and what's-his-name that you'll forget all about your English mate, St. Clair." "Ha! So you are English!" I poke him in the stomach. He grabs my hand and we wrestle, laughing. "I claim....no...nationality." I break free. "Whatever,I totally caught you. Ow!" A gray-haired man in sunglasses bumps his red plaid suitcase into my legs. "Hey,you! Apologize!" St. Clair says,but the guy is already too far away to hear. I rub my shins. "It's okay, we're in the way. I should go." Time to hug again. Why can't we do it? Finally, I step forward and put my arms around him. He's stiff,and it's awkward, especially with our backpacks in the way.I smell his hair again. Oh heavens. We pull apart. "Have fun at the show tonight" he says. "I will.Have a good flight." "Thanks." He bites his thumbnail,and then I'm through security and riding down the escalator. I look back one last time. St. Clair jumps up and down, waving at me.I burst into laughter, and his face lights up.The escalator slides down. He's lost from view. I swallow hard and turn around.And then-there they are.Mom has a gigantic smile, and Seany is jumping and waving, just like St. Clair.

It was difficult to imagine that a full day hadn't yet passed since we boarded the airliner in New York. I paused. Medieval man believed that one was placed beyond the touch of time, and therefore aging, while attending Mass. What, I wondered, would he have made of those hours we left up in the sky? I would not change my watch until I gave the matter more thought.

The person who boarded that flight from LAX to Maui was weak. She was scared. Now I feel strong. Not quite indestructible, but much more durable. Like I used to be that crappy paper towel they show in the commercial, and now I’m the five-ply one. I used to break easily when there was a spill. Now I can mop up almost any mess. Pour that shit on me. I can handle it.

When they called boarding for my flight, I got that going-back-to-the-USA feeling. I always went back, no matter how fucked up it was, because America, fuck yeah: milkshakes and giant movie theaters and highways and barbecue and simple politics with only two parties that mostly agreed on mostly everything that mattered, like bombing the shit out of everywhere else.

As she made her way through the tedium of check-in lines, security lines, boarding lines, she noticed several people wearing paper surgical masks. She wondered if they were being paranoid about that new virus she’d been hearing about. As she stepped from the jetway into the plane, it struck her that for fifteen hours she’d be sealed in a metal tube with hundreds of people. She wished she’d thought to get a mask for herself. It was good she was leaving when she was; if the virus spread, it might get complicated to fly. But then she looked around at all the people cramming their wheelie bags into overhead bins, adjusting their neck pillows, scrolling through the in-flight video choices, and dismissed the idea. Restless humans. You’d never stop them traveling.

This point is made with a great metaphor for the consequences of societal inequality.41 The frequency of “air rage”—a passenger majorly, disruptively, dangerously losing it over something on a flight—has been increasing. Turns out there’s a substantial predictor of it: if the plane has a first-class section, there’s almost a fourfold increase in the odds of a coach passenger having air rage. Force coach passengers to walk through first class when boarding, and you more than double the chances further. Nothing like starting a flight by being reminded of where you fit into the class hierarchy. And completing the parallel with violent crime, when air rage is boosted in coach by reminders of inequality, the result is not a crazed coach passenger sprinting into first class to shout Marxist slogans. It’s the guy being awful to the old woman sitting next to him, or to the flight attendant.*

Anything perceived as a threat trips the amygdala—the brain’s hand-wringing sentry—to set in motion the biochemical cascade known as the fight-or-flight response. Bruce Siddle, who consults in this area and sits on the board of Strategic Operations, prefers the term “survival stress response.” Whatever you wish to call it, here is a nice, concise summary, courtesy of Siddle: “You become fast, strong, and dumb.” Our hardwired survival strategy evolved back when threats took the form of man-eating mammals, when hurling a rock superhumanly hard or climbing a tree superhumanly fast gave you the edge that might keep you alive. A burst of adrenaline prompts a cortisol dump to the bloodstream. The cortisol sends the lungs into overdrive to bring in more oxygen, and the heart rate doubles or triples to deliver it more swiftly. Meanwhile the liver spews glucose, more fuel for the feats at hand. To get the goods where the body assumes they’re needed, blood vessels in the large muscles of the arms and legs dilate, while vessels serving lower-priority organs (the gut, for example, and the skin) constrict. The prefrontal cortex, a major blood guzzler, also gets rationed. Good-bye, reasoning and analysis. See you later, fine motor skills. None of that mattered much to early man. You don’t need to weigh your options in the face of a snarling predator, and you don’t have time.

In the early 1980s, managers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) estimated that the flights would be 99.999 percent reliable, which represents a failure rate of only 1 in 100,000. According to the physicist Richard Feynman, who was a member of the commission that investigated the January 1986 Challenger accident, in which the shuttle broke apart shortly into its flight, killing all seven astronauts on board, this “would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one.” He wondered, “What is the cause of management’s fantastic faith in the machinery?” Engineers, who were more familiar with the shuttle itself and with machines in general, predicted only a 99 percent success rate, or a failure every 100 launches. A range safety officer, who personally observed test firings during the developmental phase of the rocket motors, expected a failure rate of 1 in 25. The Challenger accident proved that estimate to be the actual failure rate, giving a success rate of 96 percent after exactly 25 launchings.

THE TERRORIST ATTACKS came one after another during 1985, all broadcast live on network television to tens of millions of Americans. In June two Lebanese terrorists hijacked TWA Flight 847, murdered a Navy diver on board, and negotiated while mugging for cameras on a Beirut runway. In October the Palestinian terrorist Abu Abbas hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro in Italy, murdered a sixty-nine-year-old Jewish-American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, dumped his body overboard, and ultimately escaped to Baghdad with Egyptian and Italian collaboration. Just after Christmas, Palestinian gunmen with the Abu Nidal Organization opened fire on passengers lined up at El Al ticket counters in Vienna and Rome, killing nineteen people, among them five Americans. One of the American victims was an eleven-year-old girl named Natasha Simpson who died in her father’s arms after a gunman unloaded an extra round in her head just to make sure. The attackers, boyish products of Palestinian refugee camps, had been pumped full of amphetamines by their handlers just before the holiday attacks.

at eight A.M. We landed in Los Angeles five hours later, but our connecting flight was delayed for four hours. Well, L.A. time is two hours later than Hawaii time, so it was dinner hour when we boarded the next plane for another five-hour flight that actually put us in New York eight hours later, because of the three-hour time change. Then, after waiting forty-five minutes for our luggage, we took an hour-and-a-half limo ride from New York to Stoneybrook, Connecticut. Got all that? Okay, for the grand prize, what time was it when we walked

When Jim found a bone that had been part of somebody’s hand, I understood that this wasn’t just Carole Lombard’s story. It was the pilot’s story and the co-pilot’s and the stewardess’s. It was the story of 15 Army Air Corps personnel who perished, men as young as 19 and as “old” as 28, and it was the story of three other civilians, all of whom died right there, on the spot where I stood shivering in the fading October sunshine at 7,700 feet. I started writing on the plane ride home and haven’t stopped since. I have had extreme good fortune in my research, accessing the complete Civil Aeronautics Board investigation, including the exhibits and testimony. I have examined the U.S. House of Representatives

Here are the top four stupid procedures at our airports: One, an absolutely redundant item, is the silly bits of paper with an elastic attached, called hand baggage tags. Passengers attach them to their bags, and they are stamped after passing through the x-ray machine. Later, half a dozen people check your stamp until you board your flight. The stamp and the tag are redundant. Nobody should be able to get bags inside without an x-ray in the first place. If they can, and thus have sneaked in a non-x-rayed, unstamped bag, can’t they hide it in another bigger empty stamped bag? While the x-ray is required, the tag-stamp routine is unnecessary. In fact, the stamp creates a false sense of security—it seems like an approval.

When the National Transportation Safety Board analyzed its database of major flight accidents, it found that 73 percent occurred on a flight crew’s first day working together. Like surgeries and putts, the best flight is one in which everything goes according to routines long understood and optimized by everyone involved, with no surprises. When the path is unclear—a game of Martian tennis—those same routines no longer suffice. “Some tools work fantastically in certain situations, advancing technology in smaller but important ways, and those tools are well known and well practiced,” Andy Ouderkirk told me. “Those same tools will also pull you away from a breakthrough innovation. In fact, they’ll turn a breakthrough innovation into an incremental one.

My family had been in a refugee camp for a year and I was thirty-one years old when the government of Israel arranged through secret channels to fly all the Jews of Yemen to Israel. It was unofficially called Operation Magic Carpet, and officially called Operation On Wings of Eagles. When our people refused to enter the airplanes out of fear—for especially our brethren from the North had no experience with modernity—our rabbis reminded them of divine passages. “This is the fulfillment of ancient prophecy,” they said. “The eagles that fly us to the Promised Land may be made of metal, but their wings are buoyed aloft by the breath of God.” Between June 1949 and September 1950 almost fifty thousand Yemenite Jews boarded transport planes and made some 380 flights from Aden to Israel in this secret operation.

If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.

Despair springs eternal. At least since the Hebrew prophets and the Book of Revelation, seers have warned their contemporaries about an imminent doomsday. Forecasts of End Times are a staple of psychics, mystics, televangelists, nut cults, founders of religions, and men pacing the sidewalk with sandwich boards saying “Repent!”9 The storyline that climaxes in harsh payback for technological hubris is an archetype of Western fiction, including Promethean fire, Pandora’s box, Icarus’s flight, Faust’s bargain, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Frankenstein’s monster, and, from Hollywood, more than 250 end-of-the-world flicks.10 As the historian of science Eric Zencey has observed, “There is seduction in apocalyptic thinking. If one lives in the Last Days, one’s actions, one’s very life, take on historical meaning and no small measure of poignance.

No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd. The New York Times was chucked on doorsteps the following morning. There were disparate stories on page A1—the supply of stem cells, a controversy over school dress codes, the competitive morning TV market, and five others. The physical newspapers arrived to subscribers around the same time nineteen men with box cutters passed through low-security checkpoints in four different airports and boarded four cross-country domestic flights. The flights were hijacked, the planes crashed into buildings, 2,977 people died, and the nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers.

The perils of aviation in the period are neatly encapsulated in the experience of Harold C. Brinsmead, the head of Australia’s Civil Aviation Department in the first days of commercial aviation. In 1931, Brinsmead was on a flight to London, partly for business and partly to demonstrate the safety and reliability of modern air passenger services, when his plane crashed on takeoff in Indonesia. No one was seriously hurt, but the plane was a write-off. Not wanting to wait for a replacement aircraft to be flown in, Brinsmead boarded a flight with the new Dutch airline, KLM. That flight crashed while taking off in Bangkok. On this occasion, five people were killed and Brinsmead suffered serious injuries from which he never recovered. He died two years later. Meanwhile, the surviving passengers carried on to London in a replacement plane. That plane crashed on the return trip. Daly

Looking at the sky, he suddenly saw that it had become black. Then white again, but with great rippling circles. The circles were vultures wheeling around the sun. The vultures disappeared, to be replaced by checkers squares ready to be played on. On the board, the pieces moved around incredibly rapidly, winning dozens of games every minute. They were scarcely lined up before they started rushing at each other again, banging into each other, forming fighting combinations, wiping the other side out in the wink of an eye. Then the squares scattered, giving way to the grille of a crossword puzzle, and here, too, words flashed, drove each other away, clustered, were erased. They were all very long words, like Catalepsy, Thunderbird, Superrequeteriquísímo and Anticonstitutionally. The grille faded away, and suddenly the whole sky was covered with linked words, long sentences full of semicolons and inverted commas. For the space of a few seconds, there was this gigantic sheet of paper on which were written sentences that moved forward jerkily, changing their meaning, modifying their construction, altering completely as they advanced. It was beautiful, so beautiful that nothing like that had ever been read anywhere, and yet it was impossible to decipher the writing. It was all about death, or pity, or the incredible secrets that are hidden somewhere, at one of the farthest points of time. It was about water, too, about vast lakes floating just above the mountains, lakes shimmering under the cold wind. For a split second, Y. M. H., by screwing up his eyes, managed to read the writing, but it vanished with lightning speed and he could not be sure. It seemed to go like this: There's no reason to be afraid. No, there's no reason to be afraid. There's no reason to be afraid. There's no reason to be afraid. No. No, there's no reason to be afraid. No, there's no reason to be afraid.

On our first flight out, and for all the following ones, we boarded two Black Hawk helicopters. On that first flight, we were looking for the area where a marine in our group lost both of his hands. While we were airborne, the door was kept open. There were only a few pairs of headsets for the group, so whoever was the focus of the trip got first dibs on a pair and would help guide the pilot to the right spot. The rest of us shared the remaining few sets as we squinted against the wind to the terrain below. Right before we made it to this marine’s area, the guy sitting next to me handed me the headset. Just as I put it over my ears, I saw the marine looking out the window, and then I heard him say, “And that’s where my hands are.” Suddenly it wasn’t about me, the injured guy. I was privy to this man’s intimate struggle. It was a painfully shocking statement. I knew all of the rest of these guys were injured, too, but I don’t think it really hit me until that moment that these guys all faced the same kinds of struggles and confusion I’d faced.

Captain! Firing at us! We are in forbidden territory.” Forbidden, that is, by our own people. A rectangle in which our own people fired on any plane, friend or enemy. We had orders to fly round it, but the Group never bothered to observe these traffic regulations. Well, it was Dutertre who set the course, not I. Nobody could blame me. “Firing hard?” “Doing as well as they can.” “Want to go back and round?” “Oh, no.” His tone was matter-of-fact. We had been through our storm. For men like us, this anti-aircraft fire was a mere April shower. Still.... “Dutertre, wouldn’t it be silly to be brought down by our own guns?” “They won’t bring anything down. Just giving themselves a little exercise.” Dutertre was in a sarcastic mood. Not I. I was happy. I was impatient to be back with the Group again. “They are, for a fact. Firing like....” The gunner! Come to, has he? This is the first time on board that he has opened his mouth without being spoken to. He took in the whole jaunt without feeling the need of speech. Unless that was he who muttered “Boy! oh, boy!” when the shells were thickest. But you wouldn’t call that blabbing, exactly. He spoke now because machine guns are his specialty—and how can you keep a specialist quiet about his specialty?

Now that she was twenty-two, the words were there in her head, jumbled. The feeling was still too hot to approach but was slowly beginning to make sense. If she would just give herself the time and space to think about it, to examine the thing she’d spent her whole life avoiding, she would realize that what she wanted to say to her mother was that she was the one who had no idea—no idea how badly Ky and people like Ky needed a break. No idea how speaking perfect English and having an office job and being born in Australia didn’t mean what any of them thought it would mean. No idea how hard it was to walk the narrow path where everyone expected her to be quiet and smart and hardworking and good—a narrow path not even laid out by her or people like her. No idea how it felt to suffer the slow death of a thousand cuts: from the things people said, from the way people looked at her. The looks she got when she knocked on doors, walked into a room, boarded a flight; the way they saw her skin before they saw her, wanted her to shut up and be grateful, expected her to take a joke when she was the joke. The way she was expected to feel lucky, so lucky, like her life was abundant and full, when all she felt was depleted and diminished. It made her feel crazy to be called lucky, and her mother had no idea.

When I interviewed one of the mathematicians in the study, he asked me if I knew how to define a function. I confessed that my knowledge was a little rusty, and that the definition I remembered memorizing in college didn’t spring immediately to mind, something about variables being related to the values of other variables. “But can you explain the basic concept in your own words?” he persisted. I stammered and began looking for the nearest exit. At that point, he tossed a pen in my direction, which I instinctively reached out to catch. “How did you catch that?” he asked. “I opened my hand and then closed it around the pen at the right moment.” “But how did you know when to open your hand and when to close it?” he pressed. After a little struggling, and some additional questioning from the mathematician, I stumbled to the conclusion that I predicted where the pen would be by observing its flight. “That’s a function,” he exploded. “You took information about where it was at this point, this point, and this point, and predicted when it would arrive in your hand.” He then turned to the board and wrote a formula. “I could have explained it this way, and that’s the way it’s ordinarily done. But when we do it that way, students just memorize formulas or definitions and really don’t grasp what’s involved in the concept.

In 1934, strongman Fulgencio Batista forced President Grau’s resignation. Then in 1940, Grau lost his bid for the Presidency to his adversary Batista. Four years later in 1944, he did win the election and took office for a four-year term starting on October 10th. After Grau won the election and was the President elect, Batista still in office, blatantly attacked the National Treasury, leaving the cupboards bare by the time Grau was actually sworn in as President. Since Grau and Batista were staunch adversaries, it is highly unlikely that any deal could have been made in 1946 to allow “Lucky” Luciano into Cuba, especially with Luciano having been exiled to Sicily by the United States government that preceding February. Still, Lansky had enough political pull within the Cuban government to prepare for a strong Mafia presence in Havana. In October of 1946, in an attempt to keep his whereabouts a secret, “Lucky” Luciano covertly boarded a freighter taking him from Naples, Italy, to Caracas, Venezuela. Then Luciano flew south to Rio de Janeiro and returned north to Mexico City. On October 29, 1946, he arranged for a private flight from Mexico City to Camagüey, Cuba, where Meyer Lansky met him. Having the right connections, Luciano passed through Cuban customs unimpeded and was whisked by car to the splendid Grand Hotel. Luciano, having just arrived in Cuba, was looking forward to setting up operations. Cuba would actually be a better place than the United States for what he had in mind.

Cribbage!” I declared, pulling out the board, a deck of cards, and pen and paper, “Ben and I are going to teach you. Then we can all play.” “What makes you think I don’t know how to play cribbage?” Sage asked. “You do?” Ben sounded surprised. “I happen to be an excellent cribbage player,” Sage said. “Really…because I’m what one might call a cribbage master,” Ben said. “I bet I’ve been playing longer than you,” Sage said, and I cast my eyes his way. Was he trying to tell u something? “I highly doubt that,” Ben said, “but I believe we’ll see the proof when I double-skunk you.” “Clearly you’re both forgetting it’s a three-person game, and I’m ready to destroy you both,” I said. “Deal ‘em,” Ben said. Being a horse person, my mother was absolutely convinced she could achieve world peace if she just got the right parties together on a long enough ride. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. The three of us were pretty evenly matched, and Ben was impressed enough to ask sage how he learned to play. Turned out Sage’s parents were historians, he said, so they first taught him the precursor to cribbage, a game called noddy. “Really?” Ben asked, his professional curiosity piqued. “Your parents were historians? Did they teach?” “European history. In Europe,” Sage said. “Small college. They taught me a lot.” Yep, there was the metaphorical gauntlet. I saw the gleam in Ben’s eye as he picked it up. “Interesting,” he said. “So you’d say you know a lot about European history?” “I would say that. In fact, I believe I just did.” Ben grinned, and immediately set out to expose Sage as an intellectual fraud. He’d ask questions to trip Sage up and test his story, things I had no idea were tests until I heard Sage’s reactions. “So which of Shakespeare’s plays do you think was better served by the Globe Theatre: Henry VIII or Troilus and Cressida?” Ben asked, cracking his knuckles. “Troilus and Cressida was never performed at the Globe,” Sage replied. “As for Henry VIII, the original Globe caught fire during the show and burned to the ground, so I’d say that’s the show that really brought down the house…wouldn’t you?” “Nice…very nice.” Ben nodded. “Well done.” It was the cerebral version of bamboo under the fingernails, and while they both tried to seem casual about their conversation, they were soon leaning forward with sweat beading on their brows. It was fascinating…and weird. After several hours of this, Ben had to admit that he’d found a historical peer, and he gleefully involved Sage in all kinds of debates about the minutiae of eras I knew nothing about…except that I had the nagging sense I might have been there for some of them. For his part, Sage seemed to relish talking about the past with someone who could truly appreciate the detailed anecdotes and stories he’d discovered in his “research.” By the time we started our descent to Miami, the two were leaning over my seat to chat and laugh together. On the very full flight from Miami to New York, Ben and Sage took the two seats next to each other and gabbed and giggled like middle-school girls. I sat across from them stuck next to an older woman wearing far too much perfume.

IN JANUARY 1959 Police Chief Herbert Jenkins found a poem tacked to a bulletin board at his departmental headquarters. Tellingly, the anonymous author had titled it “The Plan of Improvement,” in sarcastic tribute to Mayor Hartsfield’s 1952 program for the city’s expansion and economic progress. The poem looked back over a decade of racial change and spoke volumes about the rising tide of white resentment. It began with a brief review of the origins of residential transition and quickly linked the desegregation of working-class neighborhoods to the desegregation of the public spaces surrounding them: Look my children and you shall see, The Plan of Improvement by William B. On a great civic venture we’re about to embark And we’ll start this one off at old Mozeley Park. White folks won’t mind losing homes they hold dear; (If it doesn’t take place on an election year) Before they have time to get over the shock, We’ll have that whole section—every square block. I’ll try something different for plan number two This time the city’s golf courses will do. They’ll mix in the Club House and then on the green I might get a write up in Life Magazine. And now comes the schools for plan number three To mix them in classrooms just fills me with glee; For I have a Grandson who someday I pray Will thank me for sending this culture his way. And for my finale, to do it up right, The buses, theatres and night spots so bright; Pools and restaurants will be mixed up at last And my Plan of Improvement will be going full blast. The sarcasm in the poem is unmistakable, of course, but so are the ways in which the author—either a policeman himself or a friend of one—clearly linked the city’s pursuit of “progress” with a litany of white losses. In the mind of the author, and countless other white Atlantans like him, the politics of progress was a zero-sum game in which every advance for civil rights meant an equal loss for whites.

I turned and entered the airport with my escort. Suddenly, I had a horrible realization: in order to return to the flight line I needed to move through a modern international airport complete with metal detectors and X-ray machines and I had a loaded pistol in my fanny pack. And, because of the ongoing civil war, security was beefed up and the guards were extra wary. Before we reached the first checkpoint, I pretended that I needed to use the restroom and told my escort to go on ahead. I needed to think. One option was to drop my pistol in a trash can and exit the airport, later claiming I lost the gun somehow. The lost-gun option had serious flaws. I couldn’t ditch my pistol because I had signed it out by serial number. Police could easily trace the gun back to me. My personal interpretation of the, “no weapons” order would probably not be an effective defense at my court marshal. My other option was to try and sneak through the airport onto the flight line, somehow avoiding a gauntlet of security checkpoints. This was the ninja option. This daunting course of action was fraught with serious danger. If guards confronted me and caught me with a loaded pistol I knew I would not have a pleasant day. There was no telling where that situation would lead; there was a real possibility I could spend time in a Yemeni prison. Despite the risks I decided on the ninja option. I figured I might have one slim advantage. Maybe the guards would remember me coming through the airport from the flight-line side with the embassy official and not pay me much attention. I was sweating bullets as I approached the first checkpoint. I tried to act casual and confident, not furtive and suspicious like a criminal. I waited until the guard looked away, his attention elsewhere and boldly walked behind him past the checkpoint. When I approached the X-ray and metal detectors I strode right past the line of people, bypassing the machines. I had to play it that way. I could not hang out near the detectors waiting for guards to look the other way and then sneak past; there were just too many. As I brazenly strode around each checkpoint I feared to hear a sudden barked command, rushing feet behind me, and hands spinning me around to face angry guards with drawn weapons. The last part of my mission to get on the airfield was tricky and nerveracking. Imagine being at an American airport in the gate area where people board the airplanes. Then imagine trying to sneak out a Jetway or access door without being stopped. I remembered the door I had used to enter the terminal and luckily it was unlocked. I picked my moment and quickly slipped out the door onto the airfield. I boldly strode across the airfield, never looking behind me until I reached my plane. Finally, I turned and looked back the way I came and saw … nothing. No one was pursuing me. I was in the midst of an ongoing civil war, surrounded by fresh bomb craters and soldiers carrying soviet rifles, but as scary situations go, so far Tiger Rescue was a relaxing walk in the park compared to Operation Ninja Escape.

And indeed at the hotel where I was to meet Saint-Loup and his friends the beginning of the festive season was attracting a great many people from near and far; as I hastened across the courtyard with its glimpses of glowing kitchens in which chickens were turning on spits, pigs were roasting, and lobsters were being flung alive into what the landlord called the ‘everlasting fire’, I discovered an influx of new arrivals (worthy of some Census of the People at Bethlehem such as the Old Flemish Masters painted), gathering there in groups, asking the landlord or one of his staff (who, if they did not like the look of them; would recommend accommodation elsewhere in the town) for board and lodging, while a kitchen-boy passed by holding a struggling fowl by its neck. Similarly, in the big dining-room, which I had passed through on my first day here on my way to the small room where my friend awaited me, one was again reminded of some Biblical feast, portrayed with the naïvety of former times and with Flemish exaggeration, because of the quantity of fish, chickens, grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in garnished and piping hot by breathless waiters who slid along the floor in their haste to set them down on the huge sideboard where they were carved immediately, but where – for many of the diners were finishing their meal as I arrived – they piled up untouched; it was as if their profusion and the haste of those who carried them in were prompted far less by the demands of those eating than by respect for the sacred text, scrupulously followed to the letter but naïvely illustrated by real details taken from local custom, and by a concern, both aesthetic and devotional, to make visible the splendour of the feast through the profusion of its victuals and the bustling attentiveness of those who served it. One of them stood lost in thought by a sideboard at the end of the room; and in order to find out from him, who alone appeared calm enough to give me an answer, where our table had been laid, I made my way forward through the various chafing-dishes that had been lit to keep warm the plates of latecomers (which did not prevent the desserts, in the centre of the room, from being displayed in the hands of a huge mannikin, sometimes supported on the wings of a duck, apparently made of crystal but actually of ice, carved each day with a hot iron by a sculptor-cook, in a truly Flemish manner), and, at the risk of being knocked down by the other waiters, went straight towards the calm one in whom I seemed to recognize a character traditionally present in these sacred subjects, since he reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the snub-nosed features, simple and badly drawn, and the dreamy expression of such a figure, already dimly aware of the miracle of a divine presence which the others have not yet begun to suspect. In addition, and doubtless in view of the approaching festive season, the tableau was reinforced by a celestial element recruited entirely from a personnel of cherubim and seraphim. A young angel musician, his fair hair framing a fourteen-year-old face, was not playing any instrument, it is true, but stood dreaming in front of a gong or a stack of plates, while less infantile angels were dancing attendance through the boundless expanse of the room, beating the air with the ceaseless flutter of the napkins, which hung from their bodies like the wings in primitive paintings, with pointed ends. Taking flight from these ill-defined regions, screened by a curtain of palms, from which the angelic waiters looked, from a distance, as if they had descended from the empyrean, I squeezed my way through to the small dining-room and to Saint-Loup’s table.

She was so plain. Would it kill you to wear skirts more, he had said to her. Would it really hurt you? He was thinking of how he would like to see her when she was alone with him. He knew she could dress when she had to, but this was what he was saying. He was saying something about their private life. He was saying something about his needs as a man. He imagines America’s anger at this. It would be the women, mainly. Their eager faces had watched: Amelia boarding the plane for her first transatlantic flight; Amelia waving to the crowd in the ticker tape parade; Amelia leaving luncheons and concert halls. Some had been housewives and some, girls with dreams of loops and spins and dives, of hugging the curvature of the earth through a thin sheet of aluminum. -- After Amelia

On the drive over, Richards kept marveling at the transforming power of having a felony to commit. His brother looked more like his "normal" self now than at any time in the previous weeks, that is, like a calm, basically reasonable individual, a manly sort of fellow with a certain presence. They talked about Richards' daughter and along other noncontroversial lines. At the airport Richards stood by quietly, if nervously, while Joel transacted his business at the ticket counter, then passed a blue daypack, containing the kilo of cocaine among other things, through the security x-ray. Richards had planned to stop right here--just say good-bye, go outside and start to breathe again--but for some reason he followed his brother through the checkpoint. In silence they proceeded down a broad, sparsely peopled corridor; Joel, with his daypack slung casually over one shoulder, a cigarette occupying his other hand, had given Richards his fiddle case to carry. Soon they became aware of a disturbance up ahead: a murmurous roar, a sound like water surging around the piles of a pier. The corridor forked and they found themselves in a broad lobby, which was jammed now with Hawaiian travelers, prospective vacationers numbering in the hundreds. Just as they arrived, a flight attendant, dressed like a renter of cabanas on the beach at Waikiki, picked up a mike and made the final announcement to board. In response to which, those travelers not already on their feet, not already formed in long, snaky line three or four people abreast, arose. The level of hopeful chatter, of sweetly anticipatory human excitement, increased palpably, and Richards, whose response to crowds was generally nervous, self-defensively ironic, instinctively held back. But his brother plunged right in--took up a place at the front of the line, and from this position, with an eager, good-natured expression on his face, surveyed his companions. Now the line started to move forward quickly. Richards, inching along on a roughly parallel course, two or three feet behind his brother, sought vainly for something comical to say, some reference to sunburns to come, Bermuda shorts, Holiday Inn luaus, and the like. Joel, beckoning him closer, seemed to want the fiddle case back. But it was Richards himself whom he suddenly clasped, held to his chest with clumsy force. Wordlessly embracing, gasping like a couple of wrestlers, they stumbled together over a short distance full of strangers, and only as the door of the gate approached, the flight attendant holding out a hand for boarding passes, did Richards' brother turn without a word and let him go.

On the drive over, Richards kept marveling at the transforming power of having a felony to commit. His brother looked more like his "normal" self now than at any time in the previous weeks, that is, like a calm, basically reasonable individual, a manly sort of fellow with a certain presence. They talked about Richards' daughter and along other noncontroversial lines. At the airport Richards stood by quietly, if nervously, while Joel transacted his business at the ticket counter, then passed a blue daypack, containing the kilo of cocaine among other things, through the security x-ray. Richards had planned to stop right here--just say good-bye, go outside and start to breathe again--but for some reason he followed his brother through the checkpoint. In silence they proceeded down a broad, sparsely peopled corridor; Joel, with his daypack slung casually over one shoulder, a cigarette occupying his other hand, had given Richards his fiddle case to carry. Soon they became aware of a disturbance up ahead: a murmurous roar, a sound like water surging around the piles of a pier. The corridor forked and they found themselves in a broad lobby, which was jammed now with Hawaiian travelers, prospective vacationers numbering in the hundreds.
 Just as they arrived, a flight attendant, dressed like a renter of cabanas on the beach at Waikiki, picked up a mike and made the final announcement to board. In response to which, those travelers not already on their feet, not already formed in long, snaky line three or four people abreast, arose. The level of hopeful chatter, of sweetly anticipatory human excitement, increased palpably, and Richards, whose response to crowds was generally nervous, self-defensively ironic, instinctively held back. But his brother plunged right in--took up a place at the front of the line, and from this position, with an eager, good-natured expression on his face, surveyed his companions.
 Now the line started to move forward quickly. Richards, inching along on a roughly parallel course, two or three feet behind his brother, sought vainly for something comical to say, some reference to sunburns to come, Bermuda shorts, Holiday Inn luaus, and the like.
 Joel, beckoning him closer, seemed to want the fiddle case back. But it was Richards himself whom he suddenly clasped, held to his chest with clumsy force. Wordlessly embracing, gasping like a couple of wrestlers, they stumbled together over a short distance full of strangers, and only as the door of the gate approached, the flight attendant holding out a hand for boarding passes, did Richards' brother turn without a word and let him go.

Harry strained his ears. Distantly, from the floor above, and growing fainter still, he heard the voice: ‘… I smell blood … I SMELL BLOOD!’ His stomach lurched. ‘It’s going to kill someone!’ he shouted, and ignoring Ron and Hermione’s bewildered faces, he ran up the next flight of steps three at a time, trying to listen over his own pounding footsteps. Harry hurtled around the whole of the second floor, Ron and Hermione panting behind him, not stopping until they turned a corner into the last, deserted passage. ‘Harry, what was that all about?’ said Ron, wiping sweat off his face. ‘I couldn’t hear anything …’ But Hermione gave a sudden gasp, pointing down the corridor. ‘Look!’ Something was shining on the wall ahead. They approached, slowly, squinting through the darkness. Foot-high words had been daubed on the wall between two windows, shimmering in the light cast by the flaming torches. THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED. ENEMIES OF THE HEIR, BEWARE. ‘What’s that thing – hanging underneath?’ said Ron, a slight quiver in his voice. As they edged nearer, Harry almost slipped over: there was a large puddle of water on the floor. Ron and Hermione grabbed him, and they inched towards the message, eyes fixed on a dark shadow beneath it. All three of them realised what it was at once, and leapt backwards with a splash. Mrs Norris, the caretaker’s cat, was hanging by her tail from the torch bracket. She was stiff as a board, her eyes wide and staring. For a few seconds, they didn’t move. Then Ron said, ‘Let’s get out of here.

Psychiatrists and headshrinkers from realm to realm associate dreams of flight with sex for a reason. The thematic and mechanical differences are obvious—fewer bodily fluids tend to be involved in flight if all goes well, and the typical flight’s also short on funny faces. But there’s a breathless novelty to the first touch of both that experience tends to mellow. A flightless being’s first takeoff introduces her to a new dimension; the twentieth time her case team boards a dragon gondola to some mid-Kathic city that barely rates a dot on the map, the rush fades. Spend enough time away from skies or sheets, though, and the novelty returns.

More to the point for US intelligence, while it took the Dutch Safety Board more than a year to reach its conclusions, we had the Russians dead to rights in just a few hours, fusing data from our so-called “national technical means satellites,” intercepts, and open-source reporting—particularly social media. For me, our ability to pinpoint attribution for this tragedy to an overly aggressive and trigger-happy Russian military was particularly gratifying, because I’d lived through the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983. This time we had systems in place that were designed to collect the relevant information, systems that would allow us to show precisely what happened. Not only did those systems work as advertised, but we also had the means in place to integrate data

Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I’d forgotten England even existed.

El Al Boeing 747 took on board 1,087 immigrants; but when it landed, it carried 1,088 people. A baby had been born during the flight.

On September 11, 2001, the FAA’s “no-fly list” included a grand total of twelve names.25 By contrast, the State Department’s so-called TIPOFF terrorist watchlist included sixty thousand names. Yet the FAA’s head of civil aviation security didn’t even know that the State Department list existed.26 Two names on that State Department list were Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, both on board Flight 77.

In the Horn of Africa, a famine had created a terrible humanitarian crisis. Millions of people were starving. There were images of potbellied children with shrunken limbs and dazed eyes. The Islamist extremist group, Al-Shabab, had banned international food relief efforts in the areas of Somalia they controlled. For some reason, Scorpion couldn’t take his eyes off the images of the starving children. Later that afternoon, he boarded the Alitalia flight to Rome. It was a short flight, just over an hour. By the time he landed at Fiumicino airport, he knew what he was going to do.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Once upon a time our politicians did not tend to apologize for our country’s prior actions! Here’s a refresher on how some of our former patriots handled negative comments about our great country. These are quite good JFK’S Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, was in France in the early 60’s when De Gaulle decided to pull out of NATO. De Gaulle said he wanted all US military out of France as soon as possible. Rusk’s response: “Does that include those who are buried here?” De Gaulle did not respond. You could have heard a pin drop. When in England, at a fairly large conference, Colin Powell was asked by the Archbishop of Canterbury if our plans for Iraq were just an example of ‘empire building’ by George Bush. He answered by saying, “Over the years, the United States has sent many of its fine young men and women into great peril to fight for freedom beyond our borders. The only amount of land we have ever asked for in return is enough to bury those that did not return.” You could have heard a pin drop. There was a conference in France where a number of international engineers were taking part, including French and American. During a break, one of the French engineers came back into the room saying, “Have you heard the latest dumb stunt Bush has done? He has sent an aircraft carrier to Indonesia to help the tsunami victims. What does he intend to do, bomb them?” A Boeing engineer stood up and replied quietly: “Our carriers have three hospitals on board that can treat several hundred people; they are nuclear powered and can supply emergency electrical power to shore facilities; they have three cafeterias with the capacity to feed 3,000 people three meals a day, they can produce several thousand gallons of fresh water from sea water each day, and they carry half a dozen helicopters for use in transporting victims and injured to and from their flight deck. We have eleven such ships; how many does France have?” You could have heard a pin drop. A U.S. Navy Admiral was attending a naval conference that included Admirals from the U.S., English, Canadian, Germany and France. At morning tea the Frenchman complained that the conference should be conducted in French since it was being held in Paris. The German replied that, so far as he could see, the reason that it was being held in English was as a mark of respect to the other attendees, since their troops had shed so much blood so that the Frenchman wouldn’t be speaking German.

Along the way I’ve picked up a few tips. Warren Buffett told me he always travels with his own pillow. Good advice. A navy blue suit never shows dirt, even if you get mistaken for a flight attendant every now and then. When someone tells you they’re praying for you, just say a polite “Thank you” and move on. After all, it can’t hurt, right? Calling home every night, no matter where you are or how late it is, helps. Even when Kirk is already asleep and I just get his voice mail I feel better. Try to know where the best ice cream is in any given airport terminal. A portable clothes steamer can be a lifesaver, since you can use it anywhere and don’t need an ironing board. (Believe me, it works—even in a public bathroom an hour before an event.) Sleep whenever you can, even if it’s for fifteen minutes on a flight. And never shy away from telling people what you do. You dispel myths, for others and yourself.

Worst of all was the flight software that handled data on board the rover, writing to and reading from the "flash" memory that was our equivalent of a computer's hard drive. The read and write commands too often just didn't work. The command we seemed to use the most was the one the Flight Software team called "SHUTDOWN_DAMMIT", which was like hitting CTRL-ALT-DEL on a personal computer, killing everything off and starting over.

might spook Harald and cause him to flee. She had to visit in person. This would be even more risky. Morlunde was a town, but on the small island of Sande every resident knew all the others. She could only hope that islanders might take her for a holidaymaker, and not look too closely. She had no better option. The full moon was five days away. She made her way to the harbour, carrying her small suitcase, and boarded the ferry. At the top of the gangway stood a German soldier and a Danish policeman. She showed her papers in the name of Agnes Ricks. The documents had already passed three inspections, but nevertheless she suffered a shiver of fear as she offered the forgeries to the two uniformed men. The policeman studied her identity card.

Our 182-passenger Boeing Classic this morning is under the able command of Captain Hiram Slatt, discharged from service in the United States Air Force mission in Afghanistan after six heroic deployments and now returned, following a restorative sabbatical at the VA Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Wheeling, West Virginia, to his “first love”—civilian piloting for North American Airways. Captain Slatt has informed us that, once we are cleared for takeoff, our flying time will be between approximately seventeen and twenty-two hours depending upon ever-shifting Pacific Ocean air currents and the ability of our seasoned Classic 878 to withstand gale-force winds of 90 knots roaring “like a vast army of demons” (in Captain Slatt’s colorful terminology) over the Arctic Circle. As you have perhaps noticed Flight 443 is a full—i.e., “overbooked”—flight. Actually most North American Airways flights are overbooked—it is Airways protocol to persist in assuming that a certain percentage of passengers will simply fail to show up at the gate having somehow expired, or disappeared, en route. For those of you who boarded with tickets for seats already taken—North American Airways apologizes for this unforeseeable development. We have dealt with the emergency situation by assigning seats in four lavatories as well as in the hold and in designated areas of the overhead bin. Therefore our request to passengers in Economy Plus, Economy, and Economy Minus is that you force your carry-ons beneath the seat in front of you; and what cannot be crammed into that space, or in the overhead bin, if no one is occupying the overhead bin, you must grip securely on your lap for the duration of the flight. Passengers in First Class may give their drink orders now. SECURITY:

The steeper angle of a true dive bombing run (about 70 degrees) was far less vulnerable to flak and far more accurate. Japanese carriers had thin unarmored flight decks, and on board the ships there were hundreds of aircraft, many of them being refuelled and re-armed. All the factors were now aligned for a devastating attack. Yorktown’s

When the plane landed at O’Hare Airport, the flight attendants asked the passengers to remain in their seats. Sitting eight rows back, Kyle watched as two men wearing standard-issue government suits—clearly FBI agents—boarded the plane and handed over a document to the pilot. “Yep, that would be me,” Kyle said, grabbing his backpack from underneath the seat in front of him. The elderly Hispanic man sitting next to him lowered his voice to a whisper. “Drugs?” “Twitter,” Kyle whispered back. He stood up, backpack in hand, and nodded at the FBI agents that had stopped at his row. “Morning, gentlemen.” The younger agent held out his hand, all business. “Hand over the computer, Rhodes.” “I guess we’re skipping the pleasantries,” Kyle said, handing over his backpack

Later, I learned from several transgender friends that the TSA scanners are designed to alert agents to “anomalies” in the groin area. Specifically, agents are instructed to additionally screen all people whose groins appear to differ from their perceived gender. Across the country, large numbers of transgender people are also being forced to navigate similar invasive sexual traumas simply to board a plane. We are told that the procedures of the Transportation Security Administration are supposed to make us safer. I did not feel safe. I was terrified and without recourse. While I stood in the “private screening room” with tears rolling down my face, the least of my concerns was some random person living out a political vendetta against the United States during my flight. I was terrified of having my genitalia touched without my consent by a stranger as a requisite for passage to my next destination. This is body terrorism.

the smile she presented me with betrayed no frustration, no sense of victory or defeat, no sign of the miniature drama I’d just witnessed, and, most significantly, no invitation to share in camaraderie. It was as if the entire past had been wiped away and this moment, her smile, and her chipper “How can I help you?” might as well have been the big bang. I pulled the boarding pass from my pocket and asked about the flight. She glanced at it, typed into her terminal, its keys going clackety-clack, and as she read the screen she pursed her lips at what could not have been good news. “The delay is ongoing,” she said, “but they could clear it at any time.” I asked if she knew the cause. “Eyjafjallajökull,” she said with perfect facility. “It is acting up again. They say it won’t be as bad as April, but who can tell?” I was still trying to untangle the first word. “The volcano,” she said. Her eyes betrayed a glimmer of amusement, a perverse delight at the vicissitudes of travel, the things-which-cannot-be-changed, the fates assigned to us by the same gods who abandoned us long ago. It was the spark we see in the eyes of the patrolman shutting down the snowy pass, the local who tells you that you can’t get there from here, the mechanic who informs you that you’re not going anywhere today. She said she would be sure to make an announcement when she heard anything else. With that, our interaction was over. She reset herself for the person waiting behind me.

Before leaving town he might pass up one or two trains just to linger a bit longer in the station. The city, its centers and its sights, didn’t interest him; he’d never really get to know a city, but he knew the stations, he recognized the stations in the most obscure places, even if he’d last roamed them a year or two before. – Once the bookstores had still enticed him, the used book dealers around the station; soon he preferred to stand at the window of a fast-food restaurant on the edge of the station building and watch the world go by, gazing out from inside this refuge that was not entirely part of that world, though it was usually located on a central square around which the city’s activity gathered in an arc. That activity was closely tied to the station, but he himself had already broken away; in the station he didn’t stand out with his particular form of restlessness; on the contrary, here he found composure, here all he had to signify was flight and transience. Perhaps most of the people here, those who’d taken flight into the fortress of the station, were perpetually searching for an alibi to cling to some illusory notion of life. Someday they’d change their ways—they constantly told themselves—but it’s virtually impossible to change your ways in a train station. In the arrival and departure halls change was constantly being projected, yet everything always stayed the same, the minute in which everything would suddenly be different kept receding before your eyes. The plethora of orientation devices, clocks, information from loudspeakers, electronic departure boards, the perpetual semblance of reliability only anchored in the mind the provisional and fragmentary nature of human existence.

Now, if you’ll indulge me for a minute, I want you to think about the process of boarding a commercial airplane. You wait until your group is called. You step onto an airplane that will rush down the runway and lift you into the air, traveling five hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet, for however long it takes to get where you’re going. You greet the flight attendants, make your way to your seat and buckle in for the ride. Usually before the flight departs, you hear from the people in the cockpit, whose job it is to deliver you safely to your destination. In most cases, you don’t see their faces until you’re disembarking, when you finally see the pilots standing at the head of the aisle to thank you for flying with their airline. You’ve just put your life in the hands of two people you’ll probably never see again without having seen their faces beforehand or knowing a thing about their credentials. Many of us have probably flown with a commercial pilot on his or her first day at the controls, yet it never occurs to us to question whether they should be there.

Mr. Hardy had already booked two seats on a one-thirty airline flight. The boys drove to the airport, left their convertible in the parking lot, and were soon boarding a sleek jet. An hour later it landed at the Philadelphia airfield. Frank and Joe caught a taxi to the modernistic plant of the Noltan Medical Company. Mr. Noltan, a burly man in a tweed suit, greeted them with a firm handshake.

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The only controls available to those on board were two push-buttons on the center post of the cabin—one labeled on and one labeled off. The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button was connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of Martian mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off.

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As Karen returned from the restroom, the gate agent explained the order of boarding: People with disabilities or in wheelchairs, people over the age of 100, people who act like they’re over the age of 100, families with children (children are two-year olds and younger, not fifteen-year olds), in-uniform military personnel, first class, business class, platinum frequent flyer members, gold members, silver members, bronze members, associate members, people who just applied for the airline’s credit card five minutes ago, group 1, groups 2 through 10 in that order, and finally, anyone too clueless to figure out how to get into one of the groups already called. We had “group 8” boarding passes. We felt smug as we pushed our way past the five remaining passengers who were lower on the boarding list than us. I don’t like being trapped in a small place, such as an airplane, with a large cross-section of humanity. I think airlines should announce before every flight, “Listen up people. We’re all sealed in here together for the next four hours, so try not to be annoying until the flight is over. Once you exit the plane, then you can whistle, hum, fart, snore, talk baby talk, take your shoes off and put on as much bad perfume as you want.” I think this would make air travel more bearable. We arrived in El Paso with enough time to pick up the rental car, have dinner (at Carlos and Mickey’s) and buy groceries for the week: peanut butter, jelly, bread, water, blue corn chips, peppermint patties, animal crackers and beer.

An airline gate agent confronted me and told me that I had to delete my video recordings I had made in the gate area or I would not be allowed to board the flight. I opted to keep my video recordings and they canceled my airline ticket. The videos I made became popular on social media and the advertising revenue more than paid for my replacement airline ticket on a much nicer airline!

It is important to not be the last to board an airplane, as airplane seats are often oversold and you may find they need to bump some passengers off the flight. The gate agents will be looking for silly reasons to bump passengers off as they board the plane and if enough are not bumped, the last passengers to board may be in trouble!

The final agreement took shape during the final two days of Carter’s presidency. The president slept on the Oval Office couch as he desperately hoped for the hostages’ release on his watch. While the hostages had boarded an Algerian aircraft on Reagan’s inauguration day, January 20, 1981, communications between the plane’s cockpit and the tower indicated nothing would happen until Reagan finished his oath. Aides told Carter of the hostages’ departure from Tehran when he arrived at Andrews Air Force Base to board a flight home to Georgia. During a post-inauguration luncheon in the Capitol, Reagan hoisted a champagne toast and announced to the world that the hostages had left Iranian airspace. Sadly, Carter made the same statement in front of a few folks in Plains, Georgia.

Airlines ‘Bumping’ passengers off overbooked flights is also known as ‘Denied Boarding’.

Sheriff, there’s been a plane crash up in the Breath of Hell.” “A plane crash?” “Yes, Sir. A small commuter plane, BSA Flight 721, with eight people on board. The Civil Air Patrol called us because we are the closest ones to the crash site.” “The Breath of Hell in a snow storm,” Matt muttered to himself.

Katherine hadn’t been in a wheelchair the day she’d boarded flight 672. I’d never been brave enough to ask for the specifics of her injuries, but they were extensive. In the early days of her emails, she’d updated us all from a hospital bed. Then a rehabilitation center. Recently, she’d sent photos of home renovations to accommodate her wheelchair. Her communications were always upbeat and filled with positivity, but it was times like that when I couldn’t imagine how she hadn’t become an erupting volcano of bitterness.

It was Christmas Eve in 1971 and more than anything in the world, 17-year-old Juliane Köpcke was looking forward to seeing her father. She was travelling with her mother Maria, an ornithologist. The flight in the Lockheed Electra turboprop would take less than an hour. It would leave Lima and cross the huge wilderness of the Reserva Comunal El Sira before touching down in Pucallpa in the Amazonian rainforest where her parents ran a research station in the jungle studying wildlife. The airline, LANSA, didn’t have the best safety reputation: it had recently lost two aircraft in crashes. The weather forecast was not good. But the family desperately wanted to be together for Christmas, so they stepped on board. For the first twenty-five minutes everything was fine. Then the plane flew into heavy clouds and started shaking. Juliane’s mother was very nervous.

Twenty-seven years later It wasn’t until 2006 that Norman had the courage to look up the National Transportation Safety Board’s Accident Report for the crash and read the transcription of the pilot’s radio conversation with air traffic control. They had been doomed almost from takeoff. The pilot was using an underpowered plane with insufficient instruments on a rough day. He didn’t get a weather briefing or file a flight plan. He shouldn’t have taken off let alone headed into the storm. Thirty seconds into the flight he seemed lost and he was warned three times by air traffic control not to continue flying as he was. Big Bear airport was at an altitude of 2,100 m (7,000 ft) and was unmanned. Even with the right instruments and a modern plane it would have been all but impossible to land that day. Norman also went back up to the mountain to where Sandra had fallen. He paid his respects and continued up to the site of the crash. He was surprised, but even from that high vantage point he couldn’t see the meadow where he had been rescued. The big ridge blocked it out. So how had he known where to head for that day? Had he sensed the most likely place to find another human being? Was he lucky? Or maybe, just maybe, someone was looking out for him. This story is a brief retelling of the events in Crazy for the Storm by Norman Ollestad, published by HarperPress. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © 2009 Norman Ollestad.