Boarding Plane Quotes

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When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn't changed very much since I was a child - a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that's all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth.
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
My lawyers will fricassee your testicles for breakfast. And if you dare board my plane without a warrant, your spleen will follow.
Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2))
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.
Alex Garland (The Beach)
We boarded the plane after boxing our stakes and knives and taking them to a FedEx carrier, airport security being so strict nowadays. In the section marked 'contents', Bones filled out 'Tofu'. God, but he had a sick sense of humor sometimes.
Jeaniene Frost (Halfway to the Grave (Night Huntress, #1))
I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn’t see any way to change things. Only end them.
Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)
You aren't worried are you?" "Why should I be worried? It's just another day in the neighborhood. You know - bombs, fires, people shooting at you. Why should I be worried? Especially since we could be clothes shopping or boarding a plane. I'm not in the least worried." "Hmmm," he mused allowed. "I read about this in the relationship manual. It's called womanly sarcasm and usually means a man is in deep trouble.
Christine Feehan (Mind Game (GhostWalkers, #2))
There’s so much I can’t read because I get so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. I have been up in a plane. Give me some credit.
Amy Hempel
Prime Minister: Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaking suspision love actually is all around.
Richard Curtis
Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.
Richard Curtis
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.
Alex Garland (The Beach)
I want my heart to be the thin place. I don't want to board a plane to feel the kiss of heaven. I want to carry it with me wherever I go. I want my fragile, hurting heart, to recognize fleeting kairos, eternal moments as they pass. I want to be my own mountain and my own retreat.
Ännä White (Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith)
As we all know, everyone feels fear. How it’s handled is what’s different between people. You look into the eyes of anyone on board the plane and see it. It’s ever-present.
Michael Zboray (Teenagers War: Vietnam 1969)
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)
Alex Garland
If I die in a plane crash remember to always bag and board your comics.
Joe Hill (NOS4A2)
I'm one of those passengers who arrives at the airport five or six hours early so I can throw back a few drinks and muster up the courage to board the plane. Apparently I'm not alone because I've never been in an empty airport bar. I don't care what time you get there. Even at 8:00 a.m. you have to fight your way to the bar. At that hour, everyone drinks Bloody Marys so no one can tell it's booze- at least until they fall off their chair.
Bob Newhart
Alexa sniffled. “Oh my God, he gave her an airport scene! Just like in the books I read and all those movies. He followed her to an airport and confessed his love before she could board the plane!” Nick laughed. “Sweetheart, she wasn’t boarding the plane.” “Close enough.
Jennifer Probst (The Marriage Merger (Marriage to a Billionaire, #4))
It comes back to the question, whom are you writing for? Who are the readers you want? Who are the people you want to engage with the things that matter most to you? And for me, it's people who don't need it all spelled out because they know it, they understand it. That's why there's so much I can't read because I get so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. I have been up in a plane. Give me some credit.
Amy Hempel
The next morning, Louie was taken to an airfield to be flown to Okinawa, where many POWs were being collected before being sent home. Seeing a table stacked with K rations, he began cramming the boxes under his shirt, brushing off an attendant who tried to assure him that he didn't have to hoard them, as no one was going to starve him anymore. Looking extremely pregnant, Louie boarded the plane.
Laura Hillenbrand (Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption)
She is in every ray of sunshine that shines too bright, in the whisper of the wind against my skin as we board the plane.
Kendall Ryan (Filthy Beautiful Love (Filthy Beautiful Lies, #2))
The process of boarding a plane without a book produces a wave of panic. The right book can serve as a docent of sorts, setting a tone or even altering the course of a journey.
Patti Smith (Devotion)
Pigeon?” “Yeah?” A few moments passed, and then he sighed. “Nothing.” Travis hesitated. “I can’t shake this feeling,” he said under his breath. “What do you mean? Like a bad feeling?” I said, suddenly nervous. He turned to me with concern in his eyes, “I have this crazy feeling that once we get home, I’m going to wake up. Like none of this was real.” I slid my arms around his waist, running my hands up the lean muscles of his back. “Is that what you’re worried about?” He looked down to his wrist, and then glanced to the thick silver band on his left finger. “I just can’t shake the feeling that the bubble’s going to burst, and I’m going to be lying in my bed alone, wishing you were there with me.” “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, Trav! I’ve dumped someone for you—twice—I’ve picked up and went to Vegas with you—twice—I’ve literally gone through hell and back, married you and branded myself with your name. I’m running out of ideas to prove to you that I’m yours.” A small smile graced his lips. “I love it when you say that.” “That I’m yours?” I asked. I leaned up on the balls of my feet, pressing my lips against his. “I. Am. Yours. Mrs. Travis Maddox, forever and always.” His small smile faded as he looked at the boarding gate and then down to me. “I’m gonna fuck it up, Pigeon. You’re gonna get sick of my shit.” I laughed. “I’m sick of your shit, now. I still married you.” “I thought once we got married, that I’d feel a little more reassured about losing you. But I feel like if I get on that plane….” “Travis? I love you. Let’s go home.” His eyebrows pulled in. “You won’t leave me, right? Even when I’m a pain in the ass?” “I vowed in front of God…and Elvis…that I wouldn’t, didn’t I?” His frown lightened a bit. “This is forever?” One corner of my mouth turned up. “Would it make you feel better if we made a wager?” “What kind of husband would I be if I bet against my own marriage?” I smiled. “The stupid kind. Didn’t you listen to your dad when he told you not to bet against me?” He raised an eyebrow. “So you’re that sure, huh? You’d bet on it?” I wrapped my arms around his neck and smiled against his lips. “I’d bet my first born. That’s how sure I am.” And then the peace returned. “You can’t be that sure,” he said, the anxiousness absent from his voice. I raised an eyebrow, and my mouth pulled to one side. “Wanna bet?
Jamie McGuire (Beautiful Disaster (Beautiful, #1))
We can talk to one another on telephones in banks, in cars, in line. No more sitting on the floor attached to a cord while everybody listens. No more standing outside the booth in the cold, fingering an adulterous dime. We send each other mail without stamps. Watch television without antennas. Wear seatbelts, smoke less, and never on a bus, never in the lobby while we’re waiting for the lawyer to call on us. Nowhere now, a typewriter ribbon. Quaintly the record album’s scratch and spin. Our groceries, scanned. Pump our own gas. Take off our shoes before boarding our plane. Those towers: Gone. And Pluto’s no longer a planet: Forget it. I could go on and on, but you’re still dead and nothing’s any different.
Laura Kasischke
Truman, Acheson knew, was far more sentimental than generally known, or than he wished people to know, far more touched by gestures that to many might seem routine. On board his plane later in the year, bound again for Key West, he would write Acheson a brief longhand note marked and underscored “Personal.” It was good of you to see us off. You always do the right thing. I’m still a farm boy and when the Secretary of State of the greatest Republic comes to the airport to see me off on a vacation, I can’t help but swell up a little. “And then he was so fair,” Acheson would say. “He didn’t make different decisions with different people. He called everyone together. You were all heard and you all got the answer together. He was a square dealer all the way through.
David McCullough (Truman)
In the old days, when he flew a lot, he'd never been able to get absorbed in a book until the plane had taken off, so he'd spent the pre-boarding time flicking through magazines and browsing in gift shops, and that's what the last couple of decades had felt like: one long flick through a magazine. If he'd known how long he was going to spend in the airport lounge of his own life, he'd have made different travel arrangements, but instead he'd sat there, sighing and fidgeting and, more often than was ever really acceptable, snapping at his traveling companions.
Nick Hornby (Juliet, Naked)
What if I tell you all my secrets?” she whispered to herself. “And said that I was so close to being in love with you, so close to being entirely vulnerable and all I needed was your trust? What if I told you that it hurts to breathe when I think about boarding that plane to San Francisco? If I gave you those secrets, would you give me yours?
Eden Summers (Inarticulate)
Everyone wants to know how we can predict death. Tell me this. Do you ask pilots to explain aerodynamics before boarding the plane or do you simply travel to your destination? I urge you to not concern yourselves with how we know about the deaths and instead focus on how you’ll live your life. Your final destination may be closer than you think.
Adam Silvera (The First to Die at the End (They Both Die at the End, #0))
I've wanted to find out as much about China as I could. But that China is only my China. Not any China I can read about. It's the China that sends messages just to me. It's not the big yellow expanse on the globe, it's another China. Another hypothesis, another supposition. In a sense, it's a part of myself that's been cut off by the word China. I wander though China. Without ever having boarded a plane. My travels take place here in the Tokyo subways, in the backseat of a taxi... all of a sudden this city will start to go. In a flash, the buildings will crumble. Over the Tokyo streets will fall my China, like ash, leaching into everything it touches. Slowly, gradually, until nothing remains.
Haruki Murakami (The Elephant Vanishes)
It makes me feel that rather than worrying and theorising about the state of the world, which helps no one, I should put my energy into living and being happy. When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn't changed very much since I was a child-a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that's all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth. What else is life for?
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
Richards remembered the day - that glorious and terrible day - watching the planes slam into the towers, the image repeated in endless loops. The fireballs, the bodies falling, the liquefaction of a billion tons of steel and concrete, the pillowing clouds of dust. The money shot of the new millennium, the ultimate reality show broadcast 24-7. Richards had been in Jakarta when it happened, he couldn't even remember why. He'd thought it right then; no, he'd felt it, right down to his bones. A pure, unflinching rightness. You had to give the military something to do of course, or they'd all just fucking shoot each other. But from that day forward, the old way of doing things was over. The war - the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more - the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are - would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn't notice and couldn't remember, dressed as busboys or cab drivers or mailmen, with silencers tucked up their sleeves. It would be fought by young mothers pushing ten pounds of C-4 in baby strollers and schoolgirls boarding subways with vials of sarin hidden in their Hello Kitty backpacks. It would be fought out of the beds of pickup trucks and blandly anonymous hotel rooms near airports and mountain caves near nothing at all; it would be waged on train platforms and cruise ships, in malls and movie theaters and mosques, in country and in city, in darkness and by day. It would be fought in the name of Allah or Kurdish nationalism or Jews for Jesus or the New York Yankees - the subjects hadn't changed, they never would, all coming down, after you'd boiled away the bullshit, to somebody's quarterly earnings report and who got to sit where - but now the war was everywhere, metastasizing like a million maniac cells run amok across the planet, and everyone was in it.
Justin Cronin (The Passage (The Passage, #1))
Holy crap! Two weeks ago, I was blissfully enjoying my fairly perfect life. Now I’ve just boarded a plane to Hell—the real one, with the heat and the desperation and the…what is that smell? And it’s not even my fault—well, not technically, anyway…
Virginia Gray (The Carrot)
AT FIRST THE PEOPLE in the Severn City Airport counted time as though they were only temporarily stranded. This was difficult to explain to young people in the following decades, but in all fairness, the entire history of being stranded in airports up to that point was also a history of eventually becoming unstranded, of boarding a plane and flying away. At first it seemed inevitable that the National Guard would roll in at any moment with blankets and boxes of food, that ground crews would return shortly thereafter and planes would start landing and taking off again. Day One, Day Two, Day Forty-eight, Day Ninety, any expectation of a return to normalcy long gone by now, then Year One, Year Two, Year Three. Time had been reset by catastrophe.
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
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.
Hugh Laurie (The Gun Seller)
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.*
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
Now, I chucked my useless plastic cards on the bath mat. During my last conversation with Oli, before I’d boarded the plane, he’d said, You can’t have it both ways. You can’t drop a couple grand whenever you feel like it and then get mad at me for working to earn that money.
Kirstin Chen (Counterfeit)
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!
Louis C.K.
As students of the silver screen recall, Bogart's admonition about future regret led Bergman to board the plane and fly away with her husband. Had she stayed with Bogey in Casablanca, she would probably have felt just fine. Not right away, perhaps, but soon, and for the rest of her life.
Daniel Todd Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness)
Paper: Some inexpensive plain bond paper A pad of Strathmore Drawing Paper, 80 lb., 11" × 14" Pencils: A #2 ordinary yellow writing pencil with an eraser at the top A #4 drawing pencil—Faber-Castell, Prismacolor Turquoise, or other brand Marking pens: Sharpie (or other brand) fine point non-permanent black A second marker, fine point permanent black Graphite stick: #4 General’s is a good brand, or other brand Pencil sharpener: A small handheld sharpener is fine Erasers: A Pink Pearl eraser A Staedtler Mars white plastic eraser A kneaded eraser—Lyra, Design, or other brand Masking tape: 3M Scotch Low Tack Artist Tape Clips: Two 1-inch-wide black clips Drawing board: A firm surface large enough to hold your 11" × 14" drawing paper—about 15" × 18" is a good size. This can be improvised from a kitchen cutting board, a piece of foam board, a piece of Masonite, or thick cardboard. Picture plane: This too can be improvised using an 8" × 10" piece of glass (you will need to tape the edges), or an 8" × 10" piece of clear plastic, about 1⁄16" thick. Viewfinders: You will make these from black paper—“construction” paper is a good thickness, or you could use thin black cardboard. You will find instructions for making the viewfinders here A small mirror: About 5" × 7" that can be taped to a wall, or any available wall mirror.
Betty Edwards (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: The Definitive Edition)
My mom used to say, ‘Life isn’t fair,’“ said Shadow. “Of course she did,” said Wednesday. “It’s one of those things that moms say, right up there with ‘If all your friends jumped off a cliff would you do it too?’” “You stiffed that girl for ten bucks, I slipped her ten bucks,” said Shadow, doggedly. “It was the right thing to do.” Someone announced that their plane was boarding. Wednesday stood up. “May your choices always be so clear,” he said.
Neil Gaiman (American Gods (American Gods, #1))
Having spent my first year in prison, I want to tell everyone exactly the same thing I shouted to those who gathered outside the court when the guards were taking me off to the police truck. Don’t be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have. The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children. Huge thanks to all of you for your support. I can feel it. I’d just like to add: This year has gone by incredibly quickly. It seems only yesterday I was boarding the plane to Moscow, and now I’ve already completed a year in prison. It’s true what they say in science books: time on earth and in space passes at different speeds. I love you all. Hugs to everyone.
Alexei Navalny (Patriot: A Memoir)
The masses of people are carried along, obedient to their environment; the wills and desires of others stronger than themselves; the effects of inherited tendencies; the suggestions of those about them; and other outward causes; which tend to move them about on the chess-board of life like mere pawns. By rising above these influencing causes, the advanced Hermetists seek a higher plane of mental action, and by dominating their moods, emotions, impulses and feelings, they create for themselves new characters, qualities and powers, by which they overcome their ordinary environment, and thus become practically players instead of mere Pawns. Such people help to play the game of life understandingly, instead of being moved about this way and that way by stronger influences and powers and wills. They use the Principle of Cause and Effect, instead of being used by it. Of course, even the highest are subject to the Principle as it manifests on the higher planes, but on the lower planes of activity, they are Masters instead of Slaves.
Three Initiates (Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece)
She giggled. Giggled. Her cheeks pinked, and goddamn, if this plane didn’t get to the gate and un-board them, he was going to pull the emergency hatch.
Cristin Harber (Gambled (Titan, #3.1))
I whispered to Ossie that I wanted to see the register for Death’s aeroplane. Who was boarding the plane in such a stupid order? The
Karen Russell (Swamplandia!)
Shigri boy lost his marbles in the end but the plane General Zia is about to board has enough VX gas on it to wipe out a village.
Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes)
If she’d had the confidence then, if she’d known how to apply for a passport and buy a ticket and board a plane when she was young enough to walk away.
Sarah Moss (Summerwater)
So, what,” I say. “You panicked and left the airport instead of boarding the next plane?” “No, Poppy,” he says. “I came here to be with you.
Emily Henry (People We Meet on Vacation)
Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public's total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public's contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity-hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide. (Is it clear I was a hero of rock'n'roll?) Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It's possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn't storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed- a succesful piece of instruction only if it occured by my own hand, preferrably ina foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as a teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people's screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other. In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars- news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they needed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, it foreshadowed a period of waiting. Either I'd return with a new language for them to speak or they'd seek a divine silence attendant to my own. I took a taxi past the cemetaries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. new York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel. Is there a tunnel?" he said.
Don DeLillo
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.
Qiu Miaojin (Last Words from Montmartre)
She wondered if the guests understood what was happening, if they realized she was only a few hours away from boarding a plane with a man she barely knew and landing in a country whose culture was not her own.
Etaf Rum (A Woman Is No Man)
More often that not, it's just the thought of them that calms my nerves. I once told a claustrophobic patient to carry a single Xanax in her purse every time she boards a plane, its mere presence strong enough to elicit a mental reaction, a physical response. She probably wouldn't even need to take it, I told her; just knowing there was an escape within reach would be enough to ease the suffocating weight from her chest.
Stacy Willingham (A Flicker in the Dark)
later learned that the aircraft carrying Lieutenant Thomas Meehan, 1st Sergeant William Evans, and most of the headquarters element, flew steadily onward, and then did a slow wingover to the right. The plane’s landing lights came on as it approached the ground. It appeared they were going to make it, but the aircraft hit a hedgerow and exploded, instantly killing everyone on board. If I survived the jump, I would be the company commander.
Dick Winters (Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters)
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.
Joe Hill (NOS4A2)
The transmission of SARS, Dwyer said, seems to depend much on super spreaders—and their behavior, not to mention the behavior of people around them, can be various. The mathematical ecologist’s term for variousness of behavior is “heterogeneity,” and Dwyer’s models have shown that heterogeneity of behavior, even among forest insects, let alone among humans, can be very important in damping the spread of infectious disease. “If you hold mean transmission rate constant,” he told me, “just adding heterogeneity by itself will tend to reduce the overall infection rate.” That sounds dry. What it means is that individual effort, individual discernment, individual choice can have huge effects in averting the catastrophes that might otherwise sweep through a herd. An individual gypsy moth may inherit a slightly superior ability to avoid smears of NPV as it grazes on a leaf. An individual human may choose not to drink the palm sap, not to eat the chimpanzee, not to pen the pig beneath mango trees, not to clear the horse’s windpipe with his bare hand, not to have unprotected sex with the prostitute, not to share the needle in a shooting gallery, not to cough without covering her mouth, not to board a plane while feeling ill, or not to coop his chickens along with his ducks. “Any tiny little thing that people do,” Dwyer said, if it makes them different from one another, from the idealized standard of herd behavior, “is going to reduce infection rates.
David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic)
As governor of Florida he aggressively pushed a bill that would allow illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses, less than three years after thirteen of nineteen terrorists in the September 11 attack had used Florida driver’s licenses to board the planes.
Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
I get how counseling or therapy can help people. But I will decide whom I talk to, and when. I couldn’t stop Stefanie from boarding a plane to Africa, or rewind Andrés’s goodbye speech or… Abuela. I couldn’t change the hand of God. But I could have control over my words, my heart, my pain.
Laura Taylor Namey (A Cuban Girl's Guide to Tea and Tomorrow)
While boarding, the lady does not stop to tap the side of the plane once, twice, three times for luck, or to flirt with a flight attendant, or to swipe frantically at her phone screen because her boarding pass has mysteriously vanished, it was there just a minute ago, why does it always do that?
Liane Moriarty (Here One Moment)
As the last passengers boarded the aircraft, the constant slamming of the overhead bins started to hurt Hero's ears. The infant began to cry, and everyone in the cabin glared in Jack and Goldilocks's direction. "Everyone is looking at us like we've personally offended them," Jack remarked. "It's because you brought a baby on a plane," Bree said. "They're worried he's going to cry the whole way to New York." Goldilocks was not going to put up with this. She passed Hero to Jack and stood in the aisle where all the passengers could see her. "Now, wait just one Hickory Dickory second," she called out. "I don't care if you have to listen to my baby cry! Eight days ago I experienced the worst pain humanly possible by pushing him out of my body! It's something all mothers must endure for the survival of our species! It's natural, it's brave, it's beautiful, and I will NOT be disrespected for it! Now, I suggest you all wipe those foul looks off your faces or YOU"LL be the ones crying all the way to New York!" "I'd listen to my wife if I were you," Jack added. "She's on caffeine." All the passengers quickly diverted their gazes elsewhere. Bree tried to start a round of applause for Goldilocks, but no one joined her.
Chris Colfer (Worlds Collide (The Land of Stories, #6))
Pilots were not excused all these rigorous new checks, and when Woodie Menear’s turn came, the security screener expressed concern about the presence of a pair of tweezers in his cabin baggage. As it happened, tweezers – unlike corkscrews or metal scissors, for example – were not on the list of forbidden items; Menear was not breaching regulations by trying to bring them on board. But the official paused just long enough to spark frustration on the part of the pilot, who, like his colleagues, had been growing ever more exasperated by each new restriction. This time it was too much. Menear did not explode in rage; he merely asked a sarcastic question. But it was one that would lead to his immediate arrest, a night in jail, his suspension by US Airways, and months of legal wranglings before he was finally acquitted of ‘making terroristic threats’ and permitted to return to his job. ‘Why are you worried about tweezers,’ Menear asked, ‘when I could crash the plane?
Oliver Burkeman (The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking)
What came to me then was the voice of my paternal grandmother. She had told me once that every time Bego or Irfan returned to Bosnia to visit, they seemed to her like different people. Unrecognizable. She had blamed this on America... I saw a young man sitting alone in a plastic chair, white-knuckle and wide-eyed and zit-faced, happy and perplexed, and I knew why my grandmother couldn't recognize her own son, why I was wielding a stranger's hand. I knew that someone new would get off this plastic chair and board a plane to Los Angeles and that all the while an 18-year-old Ismet would remain forever in the city under siege, in the midst of a war that would never end. (p.18)
Ismet Prcic (Shards)
I ask Dennis how, knowing what he knows and seeing what he sees, he ever manages to board a plane. He points out that most crashing airplanes don’t hit the ground from thirty thousand feet. The vast majority crash on takeoff or landing, either on or near the ground. Shanahan says 80 to 85 percent of plane crashes are potentially survivable.
Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)
When the first contingents of U.S. troops were being sent to Saudi Arabia, in August of 1990, Corporal Jeff Patterson, a twenty-two-year-old Marine stationed in Hawaii, sat down on the runway of the airfield and refused to board a plane bound to Saudi Arabia. He asked to be discharged from the Marine Corps: I have come to believe that there are no justified wars. . . . I began to question exactly what I was doing in the Marine Corps about the time I began to read about history. I began to read up on America's support for the murderous regimes of Guatemala, Iran, under the Shah, and El Salvador. . . . I object to the military use of force against any people, anywhere, any time.
Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
How was she to know that Carmen had stood at the back door that night? That she’d seen her father’s face slowly consumed by licking flames and tiptoed back into the house? In fifteen years, Carmen would board a plane to Miami, and Dolores would never see her again. She would think it was politics that had divided her from her firstborn daughter.
Gabriela Garcia (Of Women and Salt)
I tell myself that I want to live a happy life, and that the circumstances for happiness just haven’t arisen. But what if that’s not true? What if I’m the one who can’t let myself be happy? Because I’m scared, or I prefer to wallow in self-pity, or I don’t believe I deserve good things, or some other reason. Whenever something good happens to me I always find myself thinking: I wonder how long it will be until this turns out badly. And I almost want the worst to happen sooner, sooner rather than later, and if possible straight away, so at least I don’t have to feel anxious about it anymore. If, as I think is quite possible now, I never have any children and never write any books, I suppose I will leave nothing on this earth to be remembered by. And maybe that’s better. It makes me feel that rather than worrying and theorising about the state of the world, which helps no one, I should put my energy into living and being happy. When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child – a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth. What else is life for? But even that seems so beyond me that it’s like a dream, completely unrelated to anything in reality.
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
If you act like a child,” I said, “I’ll treat you like one.” I don’t know why I said it; I suppose Shawn was on my mind. I regretted the words even as they left my lips, hated myself for saying them. I turned to pass the tea set to my sister, so she could administer justice however she saw fit, but when I saw her expression I nearly dropped it. Her mouth hung open in a perfect circle. “Shawn used to say that,” she said, fixing her eyes on mine. That moment would stay with me. I would remember it the next day, when I boarded a plane in Salt Lake City, and it would still be on my mind when I landed in London. It was the shock of it that I couldn’t shake. Somehow, it had never occurred to me that my sister might have lived my life before I did.
Tara Westover (Educated)
These boys would be better off hog-tied than playing for a woman!” shouted another. The discordant men gathered at the back exit. Moonshiner opened the door and they poured out, while inside we could hear in the distance the sound of a plane flying into our airfield. We knew another body was likely on board, this time carrying the remains of a soldier from a neighboring town.
Marjorie Herrera Lewis (When the Men Were Gone)
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.
Geraldine Brooks (Horse)
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.
Stephanie Perkins (Anna and the French Kiss (Anna and the French Kiss, #1))
I think is quite possible now, I never have any children and never write any books, I suppose I will leave nothing on this earth to be remembered by. And maybe that’s better. It makes me feel that rather than worrying and theorising about the state of the world, which helps no one, I should put my energy into living and being happy. When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child – a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth. What else is life for?
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
The Confederate Air Force planes carried gear that when flown close to a cell phone tower allowed those on board to log in passively and see a real-time record of every phone making a call. Task force personnel could then search for numbers in which they were interested, and the database would tell them if those phones were in use, and if so, where. “We’d pinpoint the location, we’d go hit the target,” said an operator. The cell phone tower info might guide the task force to a particular city block. At that point, the operators would use an “electronic divining rod,” a handheld paddlelike sensor that could be programmed to detect a specific phone and would beep increasingly loudly as it got closer to the device.22 The divining rod could even detect a phone that had been turned off, although not one with the battery and SIM card removed.
Sean Naylor (Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command)
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.
Chuck Klosterman (The Nineties: A Book)
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.*
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
[ Dr. Lois Jolyon West was cleared at Top Secret for his work on MKULTRA. ] Dr. Michael Persinger [235], another FSMF Board Member, is the author of a paper entitled “Elicitation of 'Childhood Memories' in Hypnosis-Like Settings Is Associated With Complex Partial Epileptic-Like Signs For Women But Not for Men: the False Memory Syndrome.” In the paper Perceptual and Motor Skills,In the paper, Dr. Persinger writes: On the day of the experiment each subject (not more than two were tested per day) was asked to sit quietly in an acoustic chamber and was told that the procedure was an experiment in relaxation. The subject wore goggles and a modified motorcycle helmet through which 10-milligauss (1 microTesla) magnetic fields were applied through the temporal plane. Except for a weak red (photographic developing) light, the room was dark. Dr. Persinger's research on the ability of magnetic fields to facilitate the creation of false memories and altered states of consciousness is apparently funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency through the project cryptonym SLEEPING BEAUTY. Freedom of Information Act requests concerning SLEEPING BEAUTY with a number of different intelligence agencies including the CIA and DEA has yielded denial that such a program exists. Certainly, such work would be of direct interest to BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA and other non-lethal weapons programs. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. Persinger as an Interview Source in his book on remote viewing operations conducted under Stargate, Grill Flame and other cryptonyms at Fort Meade and on contract to the Stanford Research Institute. Schnabel states (p. 220) that, “As one of the Pentagon's top scientists, Vorona was privy to some of the strangest, most secret research projects ever conceived. Grill Flame was just one. Another was code-named Sleeping Beauty; it was a Defense Department study of remote microwave mind-influencing techniques ... [...] It appears from Schnabel's well-documented investigations that Sleeping Beauty is a real, but still classified mind control program. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. West as an Interview Source and says that West was a, “Member of medical oversight board for Science Applications International Corp. remote-viewing research in early 1990s.
Colin A. Ross (The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists)
When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child – a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. Never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth. What else is life for?
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
Shared public meaning gives soldiers a context for their losses and their sacrifice that is acknowledged by most of the society. That helps keep at bay the sense of futility and rage that can develop among soldiers during a war that doesn’t seem to end. Such public meaning is probably not generated by the kinds of formulaic phrases, such as “Thank you for your service,” that many Americans now feel compelled to offer soldiers and vets. Neither is it generated by honoring vets at sporting events, allowing them to board planes first, or giving them minor discounts at stores. If anything, these token acts only deepen the chasm between the military and civilian populations by highlighting the fact that some people serve their country but the vast majority don’t. In Israel, where around half of the population serves in the military, reflexively thanking someone for their service makes as little sense as thanking them for paying their taxes. It doesn’t cross anyone’s mind.
Sebastian Junger (Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)
I don’t have custody. Wayne is just—We’re on good terms about our son. It’s not an issue.” “Got a number where we can reach him?” “Yes, but he’s on a plane right now. He visited for the Fourth. He’s headed back this evening.” “You sure about that? How do you know he boarded the plane?” “I’m sure he had nothing to do with this, if that’s what you’re asking. We’re not fighting over our son. My ex is the most harmless and easygoing man you’ve ever met.” “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve met some pretty easygoing fellas. I know a guy up in Maine who leads a Buddhist-themed therapy group, teaches people about managing their temper and addictions through Transcendental Meditation. The only time this guy ever lost his composure was the day his wife served him with a restraining order. First he lost his Zen, then he lost two bullets in the back of her head. But that Buddhist-themed therapy group he runs sure is popular on his cell block in Shawshank. Lotta guys with anger-management issues in there.
Joe Hill (NOS4A2)
The sap mounts in the stems, the buds burst with faint sound, and the darkness is full of the noises of growth. There is night in the room, and the moon. There is life in the room. It creaks in the furniture, the table cracks and the wardrobe also. Many years ago some one felled these and split them, planed them and worked them into things of utility, into chairs and beds - but each springtime, in the darkness of the sap, it stirs and reverberates in them again; they waken, they stretch themselves, they are mere objects of use no longer, no longer chairs for a purpose; once again they have part in a the streaming and flowing outside. The boards under my feet creak and move of themselves, the wood of the window still cracks under my hands, and in front of the door even the splintered, decaying trunk of a lime tree by the roadside is thrusting out fat brown buds. In a few weeks it too will have little silken green leaves, as surely s the wide-spreading branches of the plane tree overshadowing it.
Erich Maria Remarque (The Road Back)
There was tactical significance: stop the railroads. An excellent maneuver, no doubt, but the technique was horrible. The planes started kicking high-explosives and incendiaries through their bomb-bays at the city limits, and for all the pattern their hits presented, they must have been briefed by a Ouija board. Tabulate the loss against the gain. Over one hundred thousand non-combatants and a magnificent city destroyed by bombs dropped wide of the stated objectives: the railroads were knocked out for roughly two days.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Armageddon in Retrospect)
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
Ann M. Martin (Kristy's Worst Idea (The Baby-Sitters Club, #100))
It’s my personal opinion that airlines can do two things to make air travel better for everyone. The first is to have the people taking boarding tickets recognize the person who seems the most unreasonably determined to be sitting on the plane, hold up their arm, and joyfully announce over the loudspeaker: “YOU, SIR! You are our winner for most unaccountably and frantically eager to get on a plane that will not leave until every single person is seated anyway. Well done, you! Can you tell us how you feel now that you’ve won?” At best he’ll realize he’s being a bit douchey, laugh it off, and might calm the hell down from now on. At worst he’ll start yelling and then everyone else gets a good show. Then give him a small medal and a mild tranquilizer. Plus a mild tranquilizer for the person who has to sit next to him. And, if you’re handing them out, I’ll take one too. In fact, mild tranquilizers for everyone! (I apologize for the gender stereotyping, but in fairness it usually is a he. And he’s usually in a business suit. And he often has triple-diamond status. And he’s occasionally my husband.) Frankly,
Jenny Lawson (Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things)
Bodies like this give sexual desire its meaning! It’s for this that penises rise like drawbridges and vaginas become engorged with blood! It’s for this that people throw snot-nosed kids into ravines, cross raging rivers, or ice-pick up the wrong side of frozen waterfalls! It’s for this that politicians undo their flies in election season, porn magazines with their pages stuck together are found stacked in church basements, people chop off body parts and mail them to ex-lovers, risk hair on palms, stolen wallets, planes flying into buildings, and lice that hop like chess figurines on a board whose players are ever changing.
Barry Webster (The Lava in My Bones)
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
Robert Matzen (Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3)
Another plane had to be rounded up and chartered to the fundraiser... a big Trump-Vance decal quickly plastered onto it... [and then] the worst plane ride in the collective experience of everybody on board, many who had spent much of their professional lives in the air. White-knuckle, head-banging lurches. Stomach-dropping turbulence. Sudden stone-falling drops in altitude and air pressure. People actually praying. Then, in the middle of it all, a report tracking the Trump team's peregrinations identified that they were riding on the former plane of Trump's old friend, the infamous sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein -- the one name he had struggled most not to be associated with. "I'm going to die," howled Trump, "on Jeffrey Epstein's plane!
Michael Wolff (All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America)
The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress strategic bombers, introduced in February 1955, have been in service for an impressive 58 years, and they will probably be phased out around 2045. The grandchildren of people who flew the original batch of B-52s could be flying B-52s today. The last B-52H was built in 1962, and this last group of 85 planes still in service has been modified and improved several times. These bombers can go 650 miles per hour and climb to 50,000 feet with a range of 10,145 miles, and they have broken many flight records. They have flown around the world non-stop in 45 hours 19 minutes with in-flight refueling, and can fly from Japan to Spain with one load of fuel. A B-52 can land sideways in a heavy cross-wind, using its in-board landing gear with coupled steering.
James Mahaffey (Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima)
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.
Nomi Eve (Henna House)
Each day, I wake to my eternal castigation, stuck aboard a plane to nowhere with seven passengers from seven different planets, all pretending we are one happy, dysfunctional family. If you board a puddle-jumper that takes you from one remote destination to another, you expect to spend an appropriate amount of time with an amalgam of random passengers. But imagine that you’ve been thrust into a reality TV show where you are forced to board a plane. Once you are safely off the ground—imprisoned without an exit parachute—the show’s host emerges from the cockpit to inform you that you get to spend the rest of your waking life with these arbitrary passengers. They are now a permanent fixture in the worst parts of your daily monotony. Now you get to eat cake with them on their birthdays and shop for their Secret-Santa gifts.
Pete Beebe (Dream Fisher: A Metaphysical Work of Contemporary Fiction)
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
Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country)
When it came time for Chris to leave, we drove his Yukon down to the base. Chris was excited to go to war-he’d spent years training for it, after all. He was somber and serious, but also looking forward to it. Me? I felt as if a part of myself was leaving, and there was nothing I could do about it. I longed to be with him, but knew that our separation would be deep, and perhaps permanent. I felt trapped by fate, a prisoner of whatever inevitability the future was bringing. We sat together in the back of the SUV, waiting until it was time for him to board the bus waiting to take him to the plane. Finally, it was time to go. Chris was wearing sunglasses, but I could see his eyes leaking tears under them. I thought he was nervous because he was going to war and was afraid that he would die. It wasn’t until years later that he straightened me out: “I was afraid you wouldn’t be there when I came back.
Taya Kyle (American Wife: Love, War, Faith, and Renewal)
Stay,” Pauline said. Her eyes were almost feverishly bright, and Mia wanted to rise and fold Pauline into her arms. But Pauline waved her to sit and held up her camera. “Please,” she said. “I want to take both of you.” She took a whole roll, one exposure after another, and then Mal came out with a pot of tea and a shawl for Pauline’s shoulders, and Pauline put the camera away. By the time Mia boarded the plane back to San Francisco that evening, Pearl in her arms, she had forgotten all about it. “Do what it takes,” Pauline had said to her as she had hugged her good-bye. For the first time, she had kissed Mia on the cheek. “I’m expecting great things from you.” Her use of the present tense—as if this were just an ordinary good-bye, as if she, Pauline, had every expectation of watching Mia’s career unfurl before her over decades—penned Mia’s voice in her throat. She had pulled Pauline close and breathed her in, her particular scent of lavender and eucalyptus, and turned away again before Pauline could see her cry.
Celeste Ng (Little Fires Everywhere)
With the fishermen and the life on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the tugs with their smokestacks that folded back to pass under the bridges, pulling a tow of barges, the great elms on the stone banks of the river, the plane trees and in some places the poplars, I could never be lonely along the river. With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)
In May of 1945, only a few weeks after the fighting had ended in Europe, I was rotated back to the States, where I spent the remainder of the war with a training company at Camp Crowder, Missouri. Along with the rest of the Ninth Army, I had been racing across Germany so swiftly during the late winter and spring that when I boarded the plane, I couldn't believe its destination lay to the west. My mind might inform me otherwise, but there was an inertia of the spirit that told me we were flying to a new front, where we would disembark and continue our push eastward-eastward until we'd circled the globe, marching through villages along whose twisting, cobbled streets crowds of the enemy would watch us take possession of what, up till then, they'd considered their own. I had changed enough in two years not to mind the trembling of old people, the crying of the very young, the uncertainty and fear in the eyes of the once arrogant. I had been fortunate enough to develop an infantryman's heart, which, like his feet, at first aches and swells but finally grows horny enough for him to travel the weirdest paths without feeling a thing.
Philip Roth (Defender of the Faith)
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?
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Flight To Arras)
My shrink suggested that if I was going to continue traveling so much that I could look into getting a service animal expressly trained to provide emotional support to people with anxiety disorders. I considered getting Hunter S. Thomcat trained, but then I remembered that he gets spontaneous nervous diarrhea every time he's in a moving car, and I'd imagine that holding a cat who seems to have explosive plane dysentery wouldn't necessarily *help* my anxiety as give me something new (and horribly unsanitary) to be anxious about. I called around to different service-animal specialists and spoke to a woman who told me it's better to get an animal who has already been trained and has the right temperament. She also told me cats aren’t preferred emotional-support animals for anxiety disorder, but my cats hate dogs so I figured I was fucked, but then she told me that the Americans with Disabilities Act was recently interpreted as allowing “people with anxiety disorders to travel with an emotional-support pony on airlines.” So basically I could bring a goddamn pony on board with me. I’m pretty sure a pony wouldn’t fit under my seat or in my lap, but I rather liked the idea of a small medicinal horse standing in the aisle beside me while I braided his mane. Plus, Pony Danza would make a great pack animal and instead of bringing suitcases I could just put my extra clothes on him and that way I wouldn’t have to pay to check a bag. Plus, the pony wouldn’t get cold because it would be wearing my pajamas.
Jenny Lawson (Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things)
All airplanes must carry two black boxes, one of which records instructions sent to all on-board electronic systems. The other is a cockpit voice recorder, enabling investigators to get into the minds of the pilots in the moments leading up to an accident. Instead of concealing failure, or skirting around it, aviation has a system where failure is data rich. In the event of an accident, investigators, who are independent of the airlines, the pilots’ union, and the regulators, are given full rein to explore the wreckage and to interrogate all other evidence. Mistakes are not stigmatized, but regarded as learning opportunities. The interested parties are given every reason to cooperate, since the evidence compiled by the accident investigation branch is inadmissible in court proceedings. This increases the likelihood of full disclosure. In the aftermath of the investigation the report is made available to everyone. Airlines have a legal responsibility to implement the recommendations. Every pilot in the world has free access to the data. This practice enables everyone—rather than just a single crew, or a single airline, or a single nation—to learn from the mistake. This turbocharges the power of learning. As Eleanor Roosevelt put it: “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” And it is not just accidents that drive learning; so, too, do “small” errors. When pilots experience a near miss with another aircraft, or have been flying at the wrong altitude, they file a report. Providing that it is submitted within ten days, pilots enjoy immunity. Many planes are also fitted with data systems that automatically send reports when parameters have been exceeded. Once again, these reports are de-identified by the time they proceed through the report sequence.*
Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do)
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Alexandre Dumas
Violet’s not getting out of our sight,” Arion adds. There’s a moment of just staring…like everyone is trying to silently argue. “No one naked in my car,” Mom states when I just stand in my spot, waiting on them to hurry through the push and pull. You really can tell how thick the air is when too many alphas are in the room at one time, but weirdly it never feels this way when it’s just the four of them. Unless punches are thrown. Then it gets a little heavier than normal. Arion pulls on his clothes, and threads whir in the air as I quickly fashion Emit a lopsided toga that lands on his body. Everyone’s gaze swings to him like it’s weird for him and normal for me to be in a toga. Awesome. Damien muffles a sound, Emit arches an eyebrow at me, and Arion remains rigid, staying close to me but never touching me. All of us squeezing into a car together while most of them hate each other…should be fun. The storm finally stops before we board the elevator, and it’s one of those super awkward elevator moments where no one is looking at anyone or saying anything, and everyone is trying to stay in-the-moment serious. We stop on the floor just under us, after the longest thirty-five seconds ever. The doors open, and two men glance around at Emit and I in our matching togas, even though his is the fitted sheet and riding up in some funny places. He looks like a caveman who accidentally bleached and shrank his wardrobe. I palm my face, embarrassed for him. The next couple of floors are super awkward with the addition of the two new, notably uncomfortable men. Worst seventy-nine seconds ever. Math doesn’t add up? Yeah. I’m upset about those extra nine seconds as well. Poor Emit has to duck out of the unusually small elevator, and the bottom of his ass cheek plays peek-a-boo on one side. Damien finally snorts, and even Mom struggles to keep a straight face. That really pisses her off. “You’re seeing him on an off day,” I tell the two guys, who stare at my red boots for a second. I feel the need to defend Emit a little, especially since I now know he overheard all that gibberish Tiara was saying… I can’t remember all I said, and it’s worrying me now that my mind has gone off on this stupid tangent. I trip over the hem of my toga, and Arion snags me before I hit the floor, righting me and showing his hands to my mother with a quick grin. “Can’t just let her fall,” he says unapologetically. “You’re going to have to learn to deal with that,” she bites out. She has a very good point. I don’t trip very often, but things and people usually knock me around a good bit of my life. The two guys look like they want to run, so I hurry to fix this. “Really, it’s a long story, but I swear Emit—the tallest one in the fitted-sheet-toga—generally wears pants…er…I guess you guys call them trousers over here. Anyway, we had some plane problems,” I carry on, and then realize I have to account for the fact we’re both missing clothing. “Then there was a fire that miraculously only burned our clothes, because Emit put all my flames out by smothering me with his body,” I state like that’s exactly what happened. Why do they look so scared? I’m not telling a scary lie. At this point, I’ve just made it worse, and fortunately Damien takes mercy, clamping his hand over my mouth as he starts steering me toward the door before I can make it…whatever comes after worse but before the worst. “Thank you,” sounds more like “Mmdi ooooo,” against his hand, but he gets the gist, as he grins. Mom makes a frustrated sound. “Another minute, and she’d be bragging about his penis size in quest to save his dignity. Did you really want to hear that?” Damien asks her, forcing me to groan against his hand.
Kristy Cunning (Gypsy Moon (All The Pretty Monsters, #4))
There's a million dark little corners in Baytowne for you two to snuggle-" "Ohmysweetgoodness, Chloe, stop!" I giggle and shiver at the same time and accidentally imagine walking around The Village in Baytowne Wharf with Galen. The Village is exactly that-a sleepy little village of tourist shops in the middle of a golf-course resort. During the daytime anyway. At night though...that's when the dance club wakes up and opens its doors to all the sunburned partiers roaming the cobblestoned walkways with their daiquiris. Galen would look great under the twinling lights, even with a shirt on... Chloe smirks. "Uh-huh. Already thought of that, huh?" "No!" "Uh-huh. Then why are your cheeks as red as hot sauce?" "Nuh-uh!" I laugh. She does, too. "You want me to go ask him to meet us, then?" I nod. "How old do you think he is?" She shrugs. "Not creepy-old. Old enough for me to be jailboat, though. Lucky for him, you just turned eighteen...What the...did you just kick me?" She peers into the water, wswipes her hand over the surface as if clearing away something to see better. "Something just bumped me.” She cups her hands over her eyes and squints, leaving down so close that one good wave could slap her chin. The concentration on her face almost convinces me. Almost. But I grew up with Chloe-we’ve been next-door neighbors since the third grade. I’ve grown used to fake rubber snakes on my front porch, salt in the sugar dish, and Saran wrap spread across the toilet seat-well, actually, Mom fell prey to that one. The point is Chloe loves pranks almost as much as she loves running. And this is definitely a prank. “Yep, I kicked you,” I tell her, rolling my eyes. “But…but you can’t reach me, Emma. My legs are longer than yours, and I can’t reach you…There it is again! You didn’t feel that?” I didn’t feel it, but I did see her leg twitch. I wonder how long she’s been planning this. Since we got here? Since we boarded the plane in Jersey? Sine we turned twelve?
Anna Banks (Of Poseidon (The Syrena Legacy, #1))
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.
William F. Sine (Guardian Angel: Life and Death Adventures with Pararescue, the World's Most Powerful Commando Rescue Force)
A man can survive ten years--but twenty-five, who can get through alive? Shukhov rather enjoyed having everybody poke a finger at him as if to say: Look at him, his term's nearly up. But he had his doubts about it. Those zeks who finished their time during the war had all been "retained pending special instructions" and had been released only in '46. Even those serving three-year sentences were kept for another five. The law can be stood on its head. When your ten years are up they can say, "Here's another ten for you." Or exile you. Yet there were times when you thought about it and you almost choked with excitement. Yes, your term really _is_ coming to an end; the spool is unwinding. . . . Good God! To step out to freedom, just walk out on your own two feet. But it wasn't right for an old-timer to talk about it aloud, and Shukhov said to Kilgas: "Don't you worry about those twenty-five years of yours. It's not a fact you'll be in all that time. But that I've been in eight full years--now that is a fact." Yes, you live with your feet in the mud and there's no time to be thinking about how you got in or how you're going to get out. According to his dossier, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov had been sentenced for high treason. He had testified to it himself. Yes, he'd surrendered to the Germans with the intention of betraying his country and he'd returned from captivity to carry out a mission for German intelligence. What sort of mission neither Shukhov nor the interrogator could say. So it had been left at that- -a mission. Shukhov had figured it all out. If he didn't sign he'd be shot If he signed he'd still get a chance to live. So he signed. But what really happened was this. In February 1942 their whole army was surrounded on the northwest front No food was parachuted to them. There were no planes. Things got so bad that they were scraping the hooves of dead horses--the horn could be soaked In water and eaten. Their ammunition was gone. So the Germans rounded them up in the forest, a few at a time. Shukhov was In one of these groups, and remained in German captivity for a day or two. Then five of them managed to escape. They stole through the forest and marshes again, and, by a miracle, reached their own lines. A machine gunner shot two of them on the spot, a third died of his wounds, but two got through. Had they been wiser they'd have said they'd been wandering in the forest, and then nothing would have happened. But they told the truth: they said they were escaped POW's. POW's, you fuckers! If all five of them had got through, their statements could have been found to tally and they might have been believed. But with two it was hopeless. You've put your damned heads together and cooked up that escape story, they were told. Deaf though he was, Senka caught on that they were talking about escaping from the Germans, and said in a loud voice: "Three times I escaped, and three times they caught me." Senka, who had suffered so much, was usually silent: he didn't hear what people said and didn't mix in their conversation. Little was known about him--only that he'd been in Buchenwald, where he'd worked with the underground and smuggled in arms for the mutiny; and how the Germans had punished him by tying his wrists behind his back, hanging him up by them, and whipping him. "You've been In for eight years, Vanya," Kilgas argued. "But what camps? Not 'specials.' You bad breads to sleep with. You didn't wear numbers. But try and spend eight years in a 'special'--doing hard labor. No one's come out of a 'special' alive." "Broads! Boards you mean, not broads." Shukhov stared at the coals in the stove and remeinbered his seven years in the North. And how he worked for three years hauling logs--for packing cases and railroad ties. The flames in the campfires had danced up there, too--at timber-felling during the night. Their chief made it a rule that any squad that had failed to meet its quota had to stay In the forest after dark.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich)
After I checked my suitcase, I walked through the terminal crying. When you go to boarding school, you're always leaving your family, not once but over and over and over, and it's not like it is when you're in college because you're older then and you're sort of supposed to be gone from them. I cried because of how guilty I felt, and because of how indulgent my guilt was. Standing in a store that sold bottled water and birthday cards and T-shirts that said Indiana in ornate writing, less than twenty minutes away from my father's house, I missed them so much I was tempted to call my mother and ask her to come wait with me for the plane; she'd have done it. But then she'd know what she'd probably only suspected--how messed up I really was, how much I'd been misleading them for the last four years. It would be much better once I got on the plane, better still back on campus. But while I was in their city, it just seemed like such a mistake that I had ever left home, such an error in judgement on all our parts.
Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep)
In the weeks afterward, as part of its investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board placed experienced crews in simulators and re-created the conditions faced by Flight 232 at the moment it lost all hydraulics. The simulation was run twenty-eight times. All twenty-eight times, the planes crashed, spiraling to the ground without getting close to Sioux City. All of which underlines a strange truth. The crew of Flight 232 succeeded not because of their individual skills but because they were able to combine those skills into a greater intelligence. They demonstrated that a series of small, humble exchanges—Anybody have any ideas? Tell me what you want, and I’ll help you—can unlock a group’s ability to perform. The key, as we’re about to learn, involves the willingness to perform a certain behavior that goes against our every instinct: sharing vulnerability.
Daniel Coyle (The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups)
No one who goes to war ever really comes back. I had lost things, had parts of myself taken away from me, not all of me boarded the plane to come home. The war also liberated me to love those I've seen as an enemy. It gifted me with knowing what I would die for and what was worth living for; being the first to love every single time and waging peace as if my life depended on it.
Diana Oestreich (Waging Peace: One Soldier's Story of Putting Love First)
Less amusing was an interview in which Billy Shaheen, the co-chair of Clinton’s campaign in New Hampshire, suggested to a reporter that my self-disclosed prior drug use would prove fatal in a matchup against the Republican nominee. I didn’t consider the general question of my youthful indiscretions out of bounds, but Shaheen went a bit further, implying that perhaps I had dealt drugs as well. The interview set off a furor, and Shaheen quickly resigned from his post. All this happened just ahead of our final debate in Iowa. That morning, both Hillary and I were in Washington for a Senate vote. When my team and I got to the airport for the flight to Des Moines, Hillary’s chartered plane turned out to be parked right next to ours. Before takeoff, Huma Abedin, Hillary’s aide, found Reggie and let him know that the senator was hoping to speak to me. I met Hillary on the tarmac, Reggie and Huma hovering a few paces away. Hillary apologized for Shaheen. I thanked her and then suggested we both do a better job of reining in our surrogates. At this, Hillary got agitated, her voice sharpening as she claimed that my team was routinely engaging in unfair attacks, distortions, and underhanded tactics. My efforts at lowering the temperature were unsuccessful, and the conversation ended abruptly, with her still visibly angry as she boarded her plane.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
On July 17, Putin’s troops shot down a civilian plane, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17, bound from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, over southeastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. He insisted Russia had nothing to do with it. “Of course not!” he said indignantly. To counter the harsh facts, the Kremlin put a conspiracy theory out on the internet. “I saw people claiming the CIA had put dead bodies inside a plane and purposely shot it down to create propaganda against the Russian government,” said Sri Preston Kulkarni, the campaign director for the Ukraine Communications Task Force. “People were repeating that story again and again.… And I realized we had gone through the looking glass at that point and that if people could believe that, they could believe almost anything.” It took more than three years before the Dutch and Australian governments published an official report holding Russia responsible for shooting down the aircraft.
Tim Weiner (The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020)
Because from the second I found out Eric was gone, all I wanted to do was hold you long enough to absorb your grief. To take every ounce of the pain you’ve been holding and carry it for you. When I boarded that plane, I knew I had no right to want any of those things, to want anything from you, but I want this, princess. I want to be here for you. Will you let me?
J.L. Seegars (Revive Me, Part Two: The Affair (New Haven, #3))
had always felt as though she was an imposter in her own home. A temporary tenant getting in the way of her parents’ lives. They did not neglect her in the sense that she had enough food, clean clothes, her shoes always replaced as soon as they started to pinch. She had brushed hair and brushed teeth; dental check-ups and birthday presents. But it always felt like they lived their lives in a virtual departure lounge, killing time until Louise was old enough to board the plane and take off, leaving
Alison Stockham (The Silent Friend)
The next morning the Arizona took on a full load of fuel oil, nearly 1.5 million gallons, in preparation for her upcoming trip to Bremerton. The trade winds blew steadily over the island that morning, but the heavy smell of oil still lingered. Besides that, the ship held 180,000 gallons of aviation fuel for the scouting planes it had on board and over a million pounds of gunpowder in the forward magazines for the big guns. There was enough fuel on board to get us to Japan, and nearly enough firepower to sink the entire Imperial Fleet, should Hirohito be foolhardy enough to fire so much as a round across our bow.
Donald Stratton (All the Gallant Men: An American Sailor's Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor)
Question #102 Imagine you're a pilot flying a Boeing 747 jumbo jet across the Atlantic.  The plane has 500 passengers on board, including the pilot.  Of the 500 passengers, only 200 are male and the rest are female.  Of the 200 male passengers, only 10 were older than 60 years old, 100 were younger than 10 years old, and the rest were between 10 and 60 years old.  What's the gender and age of the pilot?
Linda Nguyen (Hard Riddles For Smart Kids: 400 difficult riddles and brain teasers for kids and family)
(Which was probably just an empty casing. Probably.) Mellie stood next to him, supervising. When she saw us, she waved and gave us a sad smile, but she pointed toward the plane, where Piper stood at the base of the steps, talking with the pilot. In her hands, Piper held something large and flat—a display board. She had a couple of books under her arm, too. To her right, near the tail of the aircraft, the luggage compartment stood open. Ground-crew members were carefully strapping down a large wooden box with brass fixtures. A coffin. As Meg and I walked up, the captain shook Piper’s hand. His face was tight with
Rick Riordan (The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo, #3))
Here I experienced a rather strange sensation. As I was boarding the plane I saw that the pilot was black. I had never seen a black pilot before, and the instant I did I had to quell my panic. How could a black man fly a plane? But a moment later I caught myself: I had fallen into the apartheid mind-set, thinking Africans were inferior and that flying was a white man’s job. I sat back in my seat, and chided myself for such thoughts.
Nelson Mandela (Long Walk To Freedom)
You aren’t worried, are you?” “Why should I be worried? It’s just another day in the neighborhood. You know—bombs, fires, people shooting at you. Why would I be worried? Especially since we could be clothes shopping or boarding a plane. I’m not in the least worried.” “Hmmm,” he mused aloud.
Christine Feehan (Mind Game (GhostWalkers, #2))
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.
Collins Maps (Extreme Survivors: 60 of the World’s Most Extreme Survival Stories)
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.
Collins Maps (Extreme Survivors: 60 of the World’s Most Extreme Survival Stories)
silent boarding on a plane was completely foreign to me before I met Xavier, but now I understand just how valuable accommodations like that are. He’s able to get on the plane early, get used to his place in the plane, get settled into place, and not feel like he’s in anyone’s way or being watched by everyone else.
A.J. Rivers (The Girl in Her Cabin (Emma Griffin FBI Mystery #27))
The memories flooded my mind. I wasn’t raised in Gatlinburg. I wasn’t born here. I could still picture it all. Us, boarding the plane from our small village in India with the strange men with light skin and hair I’d never seen before. My sister clutching a worn teddy bear, lacing her fingers into mine as our parents counted through stacks of money. They didn’t even look at us; they didn’t kiss us goodbye or shed tears of sadness. Instead, they smiled. The paper in their hands brought them more happiness than their own daughters.
Monica Arya (The Favorite Girl)
Brett favors jeans & t-shirts, and he's been known to tease his friends about dressing up. One time, Gilbert Brown, a big Packers defensive lineman, was getting on a plane to go to a game. Brett was already in his seat, and when Gilbert boarded the plane in a green suit with a green top hat, Brett's first thought was "pool table." As Gilbert walked by, Brett looked up and said, "Eight ball, corner pocket." When all the guys erupted in laughter, Gilbert grinned and said, "Man, I'll never wear this suit again.
Deanna Favre (Don't Bet against Me!: Beating the Odds Against Breast Cancer and in Life)
On his way to the departure gate, Yoel ponders the identical methods that control all the airports in the world. About how all the terminals are so similar to one another that, on the way to the boarding gate, it is hard to remember in which country one is and to where one is going. And how the seriousness with which human beings adhere to the system and cling to the appearance of law and order is so touching although, like the figures in Escher's engraving of the infinite house that keep walking and walking to nowhere, each and every person is also going to his gate and to his plane seat to fly from point to point on a tiny planet that is rotating about itself, and the only route on which they are really progressing is the one leading to their deaths.
Emuna Elon (House on Endless Waters)
If we all packed our suitcases and boarded planes, what would be left of our country? If we bowed our heads and stayed quietly at home, permitting them to say that Islam allowed the assassination of writers and the execution of teenagers, what would be left of our faith?
Shirin Ebadi (Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran)
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KAVENDIS J
If I deny the existence of the airplane. If I reject the fact that I boarded it. If I refute the need for a parachute for a plane that I’ve repeatedly asserted I’m not on. And if I justify the decision that I made to jump out of a plane that didn’t exist because I declared it so, the freefall might be very perplexing, but the ground is certain to be very unwelcoming.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
I whispered to Ossie that I wanted to see the register for Death’s aeroplane. Who was boarding the plane in such a stupid order?
Karen Russell (Swamplandia!)
There is absolutely no denying that focused work is a component of success, but if we fall into the trap of only working hard for the sake of working hard, we become like a person who insists on walking around the world, but refuses to spend money to board a plane. It may be an odd, acceptable hobby but is disastrous in business.
Anubhav Srivastava (UnLearn: A Practical Guide to Business and Life (The Zeromniverse Archives Book 1))
It would be good to be a carpenter, I thought. Maybe I’d quit the newspaper business. Then the blade broke and jammed into the wood. My palm slipped off the knob in front and tried to skate across the fresh-planed surface, driving long splinters into my skin. The plane clattered off the board and went for my toe with the hellish accuracy of a pain-guided missile.
John Varley (Steel Beach (Eight Worlds #2))
To me, the board has always been profoundly three-dimensional, an effect enhanced by the chalk dust which drifts up from the tray, or is inadequately removed when the slate is washed, so that its normal blue-black monochrome is full of subtle variations, grays which suggest faraway galaxies or a nebula's gaseous clouds. And when I begin to draw a line across a freshly cleaned section, my hand follows the chalk in, as though like fish it swam there, and then, in the curve of an encircled word, it returns toward its source, and the simpler surface of the classroom world. That may be one reason why I lose my way while spelling the most common terms, for the letters will not remain in a row on the same plane as they do on the page, but sink or rise or float away, becoming curlicues and bows of string, whorls of suspended weed in which I lose all sense of the word's original identity.
William H. Gass (The Tunnel)
You do. It’s your plane. That’s why you know there’s LaCroix on board.” “It’ll be cold,” he says weakly. “You hate sparkling water,” Olive says. “I was wondering why it’s in your fridge.” “Cat likes it.
Kasey Stockton (Beachy Keen (Falling for Summer))
Did I develop my own set of random assumptions by utilizing the very little information available to me? For example, Leo Vodnik had held a magazine titled Construction Engineering Australia. Men are ten times more likely than women to die at work. Is that all it took for me to predict a “workplace accident” as his cause of death? Ethan Chang had his arm in a cast. Was it his injury that made me choose “assault,” together with the fact that injury and violence is a leading cause of death for young adult men? I know I watched Kayla Halfpenny at the airport and saw her knock over her drink and then her phone. Was it my observation of the sweet girl’s clumsiness together with the fact that road traffic injuries are one of the leading causes of death among young adults that led me to say “car accident”? Did I simply make random choices? Is that what led me to pancreatic cancer, the most feared cancer, for the vibrant woman who reminded me of my friend Jill, and breast cancer for the pregnant woman? Did I temporarily believe I was Madame Mae? I must have been thinking of my mother, because I kept saying “fate won’t be fought.” Had I somehow become a strange alchemy of the two of us? Both of us, after all, specialized in predictions. There are certain events in my life that I believe may have had a profound effect on me. For example: the little boy who drowned at the blowhole when I was a child. I have never forgotten the sound of his mother screaming. That boy had brown eyes and dark hair. When I saw that dear little brown-eyed, dark-haired baby, did I think of that poor boy and therefore predict the baby would drown at the same age? Did I look at the young bride, Eve, and remember the charming woman who came to my mother for readings, who was so excited about her forthcoming wedding, the first wedding I ever attended? Did I think of the time I saw her at the shops, her inner light snuffed out, and remember how she died in a fire believed to have been lit by her husband? Why did I choose self-harm for Allegra, the beautiful flight attendant? Was it simply that I saw repressed pain in her eyes from the back injury I now know she suffered on that flight? Was it because I knew the rate of suicide in young females has been steadily increasing over recent years? Was I thinking of death as I boarded the plane and contemplating the fact that everyone on that plane would one day die, and wondering what their causes of death would ultimately be? Well. That’s the only one of my questions I can answer with certainty. Of course I was thinking of death. I had my husband’s ashes in my carry-on bag. I was missing my two best friends. I was thinking of every person I had ever lost throughout my life.
Liane Moriarty (Here One Moment)
I began to concoct a plan right after I boarded the plane out of Fiji. A perfect plan where I would come back and see if she would give me a chance to change the dynamic between us. Sure, I love that we’re becoming friends, but I also realized that between the first time I saw her and that one night in Fiji, I had fallen in love with her.
Kendall Hale (About That One Night (Happily Ever Mishaps Book, #3))
as with private planes and private lifts, so with private education; there has arisen an increasingly segregated system of private primary and secondary schools for the wealthy. It’s not very subtle. Where does John Paulson send his children to school? His twin daughters attended preschool at the 92nd Street Y, which costs over $20,000 per student per year—yes, for nursery. Paulson is on their board. He also manages some of their investments, which he has guaranteed against losses. Many other board members have sent children to the school; four of them also manage money for the institution. This is not unusual. One of Mr Paulson’s daughters, having left nursery behind, now attends Spence, another exclusive private school in Manhattan. Mr Paulson is on their board too.
Charles H. Ferguson (Inside Job: The Rogues Who Pulled Off the Heist of the Century)
Friday afternoon before we broke for Christmas vacation, Andy and I boarded the school’s helicopter. We flew to London to catch the Simorgh to Paris. Ubaid was already on the plane waiting for us. He had helicoptered in from Dublin. Our Arab friend was in good spirits during our 45-minute journey to Charles de Gaulle airport. On the flight I was curious to find out if he had defied his father's wishes and continued to see Gianna. I asked, "You must be happy to be back at university, judging from the look on your face." "Yes, that is true. I am very happy. Gianna flew to Dublin to spend several days with me before she left for New York, with Allegra.
Young (Initiation (A Harem Boy's Saga Book 1))
Russia’s biggest downside, for me at least, is its lack of color. Being in Russia is like breathing different oxygen, and I can feel a gray shade pulling down over me the moment I board a plane to fly there. No one is animated. No one smiles, or laughs. Ask most Russians what they like most about visiting other countries and they’ll say it’s the sight of other people having fun. Throughout
Martin Lindstrom (Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends)
The crew advised us to learn the locator and security identifier methods that were so common on Earth. In most nations we would have no choice, but in a few we could choose to abstain. When I asked Will Nelson why those systems had been developed, he told me that the coded anklets had been introduced as a more convenient version of credit cards and had soon become status symbols. Someone equipped with an anklet could receive phone calls anywhere and could pick up merchandise in a store and walk out with it, free of the delay of waiting in a checkout line. As another visible sign of special privilege, the anklet wearer could walk directly on board a plane without stopping either at a ticket counter or a gate. It was only some time later, Nelson told me, that the records of position made possible by the anklets became legal evidence in courts of law. His advice to me was direct: unless I just couldn't stand the notion, I would be a lot better off letting the immigration guards at Freeport Seven put an anklet on me. If I didn't, I would be annoyed by time-wasting delays at every national border, and I'd be hassled at every residential town, museum, and shopping enclave.
Gerard K. O'Neill (2081)
Getting to the destination you desire involves walking in the right direction. You can't board a jet to enlightenment, and thank God for that. Otherwise, when you jumped off the plane, you'd proceed to polluting paradise with the hell that you thought you had left behind.
Natalie Pace (The Gratitude Game: 21 Days to a Healthier, Wealthier, More Beautiful You)
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
Julie James (About That Night (FBI/US Attorney, #3))
When I boarded the plane, I found to my surprise that Tatum had decided to return to Norman with the team rather than go to Maryland. .... When I saw Tatum on board, I had momentary regret that I had abandoned [my other flight]. I had no desire to spend several hours on the flight with him; I had learned from past encounters that he could talk endlessly, with exhausting intensity. Hoping to avoid him, I walked to the front end of the DC-4 and took a seat on the right side next to the window; but I had scarcely sat down when Tatum plumped down beside me. He spent the first few minutes telling me how unethical he thought I had been to offer one of his assistant coaches the head coaching job at OU before he resigned and only hours before his team was to compete in a bowl game. He was offended and hurt, he said, by such treatment. I listened patiently, with the unhappy thought that there would be several hours of such conversation before I could find relief at the journey's end. However, shortly after takeoff we ran into turbulent air. The plane rose over a series of updrafts and dropped violently between them. Tatum, who was not a good air traveler, soon began to feel the effects. When he stopped talking for a moment, I glanced at him and noticed that he had begun to turn a little pale. The paleness soon turned to a greenish cast, and I had a feeling that my problem might be solved. Finally, when he became noticeably ill, I signaled for a hostess and suggested to my sick friend that we remove the armrest between the two seats so that he could lie down. I would find a seat elsewhere. He accepted the suggestion, and when I left him he was in a semireclining position with his head on a pillow, holding a sick sack. We soon got out of the rough air, and I enjoyed most of the rest of the trip, visiting with as many members of the squad as I could.
George Lynn Cross (Presidents Can't Punt: The OU Football Tradition)
I drifted over to the bulletin board and read '"Don't think there are no crocodiles just because the water is calm" - Malayan Proverb.' Just beside that was, "' If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles," - Sun Tzu." It made me a little sad. In the good old days, Rachel would have had a bunch of quotes about being a good person or whatever. It just showed how much our lives had changed. In a very short time we had all grown accustomed to a world of fear and danger. We had arrived at Rachel's house separately. We had each checked to make sure we weren't being followed. We had planed the afternoon in advance to be sure that Rachel's mom and her two sisters would be out. We had even had Tobias fly over the area looking for anything unusual. That's what our lives had become. That and quotations full of paranoia and battle. -Animorphs #4, The Message page 10
K.A. Applegate
One only had to go to Kabul airport to see a classic example of the aid community helping itself rather than Afghans. The scariest part of going to Afghanistan was flying in from Dubai on the state airline Ariana. Its planes were in such bad condition that they were banned from most places on earth. Even the model plane in the sales office was held together by sticking plaster and elastic bands. The UN has its own airline to fly staff in and out of danger spots, so it quickly began its own service from Dubai or Islamabad to Kabul. As I stood nervously fiddling with my Ariana boarding pass, I would enviously watch the foreign aid workers and diplomats boarding the shiny UN planes. What I didn’t realise was that the millions of dollars to subsidise this service was coming from the money pledged to help Afghanistan. Ghani was indignant. ‘The first thing the UN system provided through the $1.6 billion of donor money channelled to UN agencies in 2002 was an airline devoted to serving UN staff, and occasionally (after much lobbying) some Afghan government officials.
Christina Lamb (Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan to a More Dangerous World)
Normally, Jared liked airports. He liked the different dialects, languages, clothes and customs. He liked watching people buy the last-minute tasteless souvenirs that only foreigners thought were interesting. He liked hearing people’s observations about London: how confusing the underground was, their favorite tourist destinations, and the little cultural differences in food. But he’d never before seen so many desperate-looking people, crying and tugging at their loved ones as they prepared to board the plane to the U.S. Or maybe he’d simply never paid attention. Every time he’d left England before, he knew he was coming back. Not this time. He would miss England. Jared smiled a bit to himself, remembering the miserably cold, rainy nights in Stoke. On second thought, maybe not. He glanced at his watch. The boarding would start soon. “Jared!” He froze and then turned around. Gabriel was pushing through the crowd toward him. Jared’s heart skipped a beat before starting to hammer so loudly that he could hardly concentrate on anything else. A part of him wanted to walk away. But the other part drank in the sight of him—for the last time—and the thought made his chest physically ache.
Alessandra Hazard (Just a Bit Unhealthy (Straight Guys #3))
Once I reached the gate, a wave of relief swept over me. It was obvious the whole thing was being stage-managed. The Chinese government was in control. I would soon be on my way. We walked out onto the runway. It was cloudy. Cold. I could see a big airplane in front of me with silver wings. I climbed the steps with the First Secretary. When I reached the door, two women appeared in front of me. Flight attendants. All smiles. “Welcome back!” I peered into the plane. There was no one on board. It was a charter. Just for us. I turned back to say goodbye, and the consul and his staff were all waving at me. I tried to say, “Thank you,” but I couldn’t get the words out because I was crying like a baby.
Masaji Ishikawa (A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea)
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.
Alex Garland (The Beach)
I was on a 747 flight out of Denver with four flight attendants on the plane. One of the flight attendants got off the plane to go check someone’s carry-on bag in the cargo hold, and while she was gone, the door closed and we began to taxi out. While we were giving the demo, we looked out the window of the airplane to see the flight attendant running alongside the plane in the snow, waving and yelling and trying to catch up to us. ‘Did you notice that we’re missing someone?’ I said to the other flight attendant. ‘Yes, but try to keep it low-key—there’s a supervisor on board!’ Well, it’s hard to keep it low-key when someone is running alongside your plane, waving and screaming. The plane stopped and the air stairs went down so she could get on board, and my co-worker said, ‘Tell her to try to be inconspicuous when she gets back on.’ Well, she had to walk the entire length of the plane to get back to her station, and everybody on board broke into applause.
Betty N. Thesky (Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase: Hilarious Stories of Air Travel by the World's Favorite Flight Attendant)
Pentagon.Across the Potomac River, the United States Congress was back in session. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, people began to line up for a White House tour. In Sarasota, Florida, President George W. Bush went for an early morning run. For those heading to an airport, weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey.Among the travelers were Mohamed Atta and Abdul Aziz al Omari, who arrived at the airport in Portland, Maine. 1.1 INSIDE THE FOUR FLIGHTS Boarding the Flights Boston:American 11 and United 175. Atta and Omari boarded a 6:00 A.M. flight from Portland to Boston’s Logan International Airport.1 When he checked in for his flight to Boston,Atta was selected by a computerized prescreening system known as CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System), created to identify passengers who should be subject to special security measures. Under security rules in place at the time, the only consequence of Atta’s selection by CAPPS was that his checked bags were held off the plane until it was confirmed that he had boarded the aircraft. This did not hinder Atta’s plans.2 Atta and Omari arrived in Boston at 6:45. Seven minutes later,Atta apparently took a call from Marwan al Shehhi, a longtime colleague who was at another terminal at Logan Airport.They spoke for three minutes.3 It would be their final conversation. 1 2 THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT Between 6:45 and 7:40,Atta and Omari, along with Satam al Suqami,Wail al Shehri, and Waleed al Shehri, checked in and boarded American Airlines Flight 11, bound for Los Angeles.The flight was scheduled to depart at 7:45.4 In another Logan terminal, Shehhi, joined by Fayez Banihammad, Mohand al Shehri, Ahmed al Ghamdi, and Hamza al Ghamdi, checked in for United Airlines Flight 175,also bound for Los Angeles.A couple of Shehhi’s colleagues were obviously unused to travel;according to the United ticket agent,they had trouble understanding the standard security questions, and she had to go over them slowly until they gave the routine, reassuring answers.5 Their flight was scheduled to depart at 8:00. The security checkpoints through which passengers, including Atta and his colleagues, gained access to the American 11 gate were operated by Globe Security under a contract with American Airlines. In a different terminal, the single checkpoint through which passengers for United 175 passed was controlled by United Airlines, which had contracted with Huntleigh USA to perform the screening.6 In passing through these checkpoints,each of the hijackers would have been screened by a walk-through metal detector calibrated to detect items with at least the metal content of a .22-caliber handgun.Anyone who might have set off that detector would have been screened with a hand wand—a procedure requiring the screener to identify
Anonymous
a slender, artificial Christmas tree with a solitary string of lights. He watched them blink to the tune of some Brazilian carol, and despite his efforts not to, Nate thought of his children. It was the day before Christmas Eve. Not all memories were painful. He boarded the plane with teeth clenched and spine stiffened, then slept for most of the hour it took to reach Corumba. The small airport there was humid and packed with Bolivians waiting for a flight to Santa Cruz. They were laden with boxes and bags of Christmas gifts. He found a cabdriver who spoke not a word of English, but it didn't matter. Nate showed him the words “Palace Hotel” on his travel itinerary, and they sped away in an old, dirty Mazda. Corumba had ninety thousand people, according to yet another memo prepared by Josh's staff. Situated on the Paraguay River, on the Bolivian border, it had long since declared itself to be the capital of the Pantanal. River traffic and trade had built the city, and kept it going.
John Grisham (The Testament)
Chapter One Vietnam 1967 I am Jason Snowblood. This is my journal. 1967 April 21. Vietnam–day one. Cu Chi. We are the only two assigned to this tent. It is about thirty feet by twenty feet and filled with cots, but Benny and I are alone. The others both enlisted and draftees have been sent elsewhere. Benny is sitting on the next cot. He is still, head down, face in his hands. Outside the mud is four inches deep. It is thick and sucks hard when you try to walk. The rain keeps coming. We’ve been in this tent for twenty-three hours and it has not let up for a second. It is hot. It might be a mirage, but I see steam rising off my arms and Benny’s neck. The mud stinks. It gives off the odor of something freshly dead and quietly rotting. The rain and the air smell old and dying. We thought we were going to Bien Hoa to be assigned to the 173rd Airborne Division, but were told to board the bus to Cu Chi, home of the 25th Infantry Division. The lieutenant who directed this was frustrated and tentative. He kept checking his clipboard and walking over to a sergeant for quick conferences. The sergeant was busy with two groups. He rolled his eyes at one of the lieutenant’s questions, and caught my stare with a smile and a wink. Body bags were being staged next to the plane that delivered us to the Tan Son Nhut complex outside Saigon. He pointed at us and said “Soldiers to Vietnam,” then to the bags and added, “Soldiers going home.” We had been separated into enlisted and draftee squads. Enlisted soldiers have the letters RA for regular army in their numbers. Benny and I volunteered for the draft, it is not the same as enlisting. We carried US. The lieutenant pointed to a battered Isuzu bus and said, “All draftees are going to replace wiped out platoons.” It took us less than two hours to get here. It started raining before we left. I hoped the rain would wash the stink from the air, but it has not. The smell of jet fuel faded quickly but was replaced by this rotting mud and the continual roar of 175mm howitzers. Benny is shaking. He is crying. I have never seen him cry. This is going to be a bad year.
Bob Linsenman (Snowblood's Journal)
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
Meg Sefton (black shatter stories and fictions)
Maine. 1.1 INSIDE THE FOUR FLIGHTS Boarding the Flights Boston:American 11 and United 175. Atta and Omari boarded a 6:00 A.M. flight from Portland to Boston’s Logan International Airport.1 When he checked in for his flight to Boston,Atta was selected by a computerized prescreening system known as CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System), created to identify passengers who should be subject to special security measures. Under security rules in place at the time, the only consequence of Atta’s selection by CAPPS was that his checked bags were held off the plane until it was confirmed that he had boarded the aircraft. This did not hinder Atta’s plans.2 Atta and Omari arrived in Boston at 6:45. Seven minutes later,Atta apparently took a call from Marwan al Shehhi, a longtime colleague who was at another terminal at Logan Airport.They spoke for three minutes.3 It would be their final conversation. 1
Anonymous
I feel as if I am living in a time of mass hysteria where it is very hard to get people to ask the simplest, most common-sense questions like: “Say, how did you board a plane to Moscow or plan to go to Cuba without showing pre-ordered visas, which you must obtain as an American to enter these countries?
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick (Privacy for Me and Not for Thee: The Movement for Invincible Personal Encryption, Radical State Transparency, and the Snowden Hack)
• While a female flight attendant was serving food from the meal cart, a female passenger thrust a small bundle of trash toward her. “Take this,” the passenger demanded. Realizing that the trash was actually a used baby diaper, the attendant instructed the passenger to take it to the lavatory herself and dispose of it. “No,” the passenger replied. “You take it!” The attendant explained that she couldn’t dispose of the dirty diaper because she was serving food—handling the diaper would be unsanitary. But that wasn’t a good enough answer for the passenger. Angered by her refusal, the passenger hurled the diaper at the flight attendant. It struck her square in the head, depositing chunks of baby dung that clung like peanut butter to her hair. The two women ended up wrestling on the floor. They had to be separated by passengers. • Passengers on a flight from Miami to San Juan, Puerto Rico, were stunned by the actions of one deranged passenger. He walked to the rear of the plane, then charged up the aisle, slapping passengers’ heads along the way. Next, he kicked a pregnant flight attendant, who immediately fell to the ground. As if that weren’t enough, he bit a young boy on the arm. At this point the man was restrained and handcuffed by crew members. He was arrested upon arrival. • When bad weather closed the Dallas/Fort Worth airport for several hours, departing planes were stuck on the ground for the duration. One frustrated passenger, a young woman, walked up to a female flight attendant and said, “I’m sorry, but I have to do this.” The passenger then punched the flight attendant in the face, breaking her nose in the process. • A flight attendant returning to work after a double-mastectomy and a struggle with multiple sclerosis had a run-in with a disgruntled passenger. One of the last to board the plane, the passenger became enraged when there was no room in the overhead bin above his seat. He snatched the bags from the compartment, threw them to the floor and put his own bag in the space he had created. After hearing angry cries from passengers, the flight attendant appeared from the galley to see what the fuss was all about. When the passengers explained what happened, she turned to the offending passenger. “Sir, you can’t do that,” she said. The passenger stood up, cocked his arm and broke her jaw with one punch. • For some inexplicable reason, a passenger began throwing peanuts at a man across the aisle. The man was sitting with his wife, minding his own business. When the first peanut hit him in the face, he ignored it. After the second peanut struck him, he looked up to see who had thrown it. He threw a harsh glance at the perpetrator, expecting him to cease immediately. When a third peanut hit him in the eye, he’d had enough. “Do that again,” he warned, “and I’ll punch your lights out.” But the peanut-tossing passenger couldn’t resist. He tossed a salted Planter’s one last time. The victim got out of his seat and triple-punched the peanut-tosser so hard that witnesses heard his jaw break. The plane was diverted to the closest airport and the peanut-tosser was kicked off. • During a full flight between New York and London, a passenger noticed that the sleeping man in the window seat looked a bit pale. Sensing that something was wrong yet not wanting to wake him, the concerned passenger alerted flight attendants who soon determined that the sleeping man was dead. Apparently, he had died a few hours earlier because his body was already cold. Horrified by the prospect of sitting next to a dead man, the passenger demanded another seat. But the flight was completely full; every seat was occupied. Finally, one flight attendant had an inspiration. She approached a uniformed military officer who agreed to sit next to the dead man for the duration of the flight.
Elliott Hester (Plane Insanity)
The president and Colson were in the middle of their conversation about Henry Kissinger when assistant Steve Bull entered the Oval Office to report that Coach Allen of the Redskins had finally arrived. Bull also informed the president of the news, just filtering in, that baseball star Roberto Clemente was on a plane that had crashed after taking off from the San Juan International Airport late the night before. “Was he killed?” Nixon asked. “They don’t have confirmation yet,” Bull replied.1 Clemente, the popular outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, had boarded a rickety four-engine DC-7 plane that was overloaded with relief supplies for the victims of a massive earthquake in Nicaragua. The earthquake was believed to have resulted in the deaths of more than seven thousand people. Most of the deaths had occurred in the capital city of Managua, which had taken the brunt of the 6.2 magnitude shock at midday on Saturday, December 23.2 The city was leveled. The lumbering plane that Clemente was on nose-dived into heavy seas shortly after takeoff from San Juan. Clemente was thirty-eight years old and had been a perennial All-Star, four-time winner of the National League batting championship, defensive genius, and MVP in 1966. He led the Pirates to two world championships, one in 1960 and the other a decade later in 1971. “Mr. Clemente was the leader of Puerto Rican efforts to aid the Nicaraguan victims and was aboard the plane because he suspected that relief supplies were falling into the hands of profiteers,” the New York Times reported after his death was presumed.3 Clemente was scheduled to meet Anastasio Somoza, the military dictator of Nicaragua, at the airport, one of the very grafters he was attempting to circumvent with his personal mission. Clemente’s body was never recovered. It was a bad omen for the start of 1973.
James Robenalt (January 1973: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month That Changed America Forever)
But the real show was offstage. Dozens of men lounged along the tables that circled the main attraction. They ranged from eighteen to eighty, skinny to fat, stout to lanky. I saw home in them. I saw fathers, grandfathers, brothers, boyfriends, professors, bosses, and preachers. I imagined their houses, their families, their jobs, the coffee shops where they bought breakfast pastries, the hospitals their children were born in, and their neighborhood route for their dog’s morning walk. I saw the gleam in their eyes as the girls swiveled around poles, sashayed in their direction, and sat atop their laps like children visiting Santa Claus. They seemed to love their oriental dolls with a toddler’s English fluency. They had their happy endings. They would soon be boarding planes, flying far away from the poverty, the mental and emotional collateral damage, and the possible babies they conceived. Thailand was theirs. It was their escape, their medicine, and their sanctuary of sin.
Maggie Georgiana Young (Just Another Number)
would announce that NeXT was bringing the world a breakthrough. But the customers didn’t follow and NeXT wasn’t close to making a profit, which companies must do to thrive and grow. At a board meeting in spring 1991, company officials delivered more bad news about poor results. Investor Ross Perot interrupted the presentation with a blunt assessment: “So what you’re telling me is the cockpit’s on fire and the plane’s in a tailspin.
Karen Blumenthal (Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different: A Biography)
There are hazards to every job, just like there are hazards to getting up in the morning. Driving to work, walking to the mailbox. Boarding a plane... The surprise isn't that we die. The surprise is how and when we die.
Tess Gerritsen (Life Support)
Muslims who had the biggest influence on the United States were nineteen men who boarded planes on September 11.
Anonymous
I ask Dennis whether he has any advice for the people who'll read this book and never again board a plane without wondering if they're going to wind up in a heap of bodies at the emergency exit door. He says it's mostly common sense. Sit near an emergency exit. Get down low, below the heat and smoke. Hold your breath as long as you can, so you don't cook your lungs and inhale poisonous fumes. Shanahan prefers window seats because people seated on the aisle are more likely to get beaned with the suitcases that can come crashing through the overhead bin doors in even a fairly mild impact.
Anonymous
A man boards a plane and, to his surprise, finds the pope in the seat next to him. Shortly after takeoff, the pope opens the newspaper and starts working on the crossword puzzle. Almost immediately, the pope turns to the man and says, “Excuse me, do you know a four-letter word that ends in ‘unt’ and refers to a woman?” Just one word leapt to mind, an extremely vulgar one. The man thinks to himself, “I can’t suggest that word to the pope. There must be another word…” Then it hits him. He turns to the pope and says, “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘aunt.’” “Of course!” exclaims the pope. “I don’t suppose you have an eraser?
Scott McNeely (Ultimate Book of Jokes: The Essential Collection of More Than 1,500 Jokes)
With his dark skin, hair, and eyes, coupled with his youth and a penchant for dressing casually, he was the spitting image of a suspected terrorist. He was the one they pulled out of the crowd to pick over everything: his belongings, his body, his passport, his boarding pass. Only once they had ascertained that he was in fact who he claimed to be – that his toothpaste was not some kind of explosive, that his coffee was drinkable, that his computer was not fitted with a bomb, that his business trip to London was not a ruse for a more nefarious plot – was he actually allowed to board a plane.
Theresa MacPhail (The Eye of the Virus)
When Diana was unable to visit, she telephoned the apartment to check on her friend’s condition. On her 30th birthday she wore a gold bracelet which Adrian had given to her as a sign of their affection and solidarity. Nevertheless, Diana’s quiet and longstanding commitment to be with Adrian when he died almost foundered. In August his condition worsened and doctors advised that he should be transferred to a private room at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington where he could be treated more effectively. However Diana had to go on a holiday cruise in the Mediterranean with her family on board a yacht owned by the Greek millionaire John Latsis. Provisional plans were made to fly her from the boat by helicopter to a private plane so that she could be with her friend at the end. Before she left, Diana visited Adrian in his home. “I’ll hang on for you,” he told her. With those words emblazoned on her heart, she flew to Italy, ticking off the hours until she could return. As soon as she disembarked from the royal flight jet she drove straight to St Mary’s Hospital. Angela recalls: “Suddenly there was a knock on the door. It was Diana. I flung my arms around her and took her into the room to see Adrian. She was still dressed in a T-shirt and sporting a sun tan. It was wonderful for Adrian to see her like that.” She eventually went home to Kensington Palace but returned the following day with all kinds of goodies. Her chef Mervyn Wycherley had packed a large picnic hamper for Angela while Prince William walked into the room almost dwarfed by his present of a large jasmine plant from the Highgrove greenhouses. Diana’s decision to bring William was carefully calculated. By then Adrian was off all medication and very much at peace with himself. “Diana would not have brought her son if Adrian’s appearance had been upsetting,” says Angela. On his way home, William asked his mother: “If Adrian starts to die when I’m at school will you tell me so that I can be there.
Andrew Morton (Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words)
Ever watched the crew aboard a commercial airliner discriminate between well-dressed, well-schooled in the English language, passengers and ones that don’t appear as well-heeled? I have, time and again. I particularly remember this one Air India flight from India to Kuala Lumpur via Chennai. When the aircraft stopped over at Chennai, a horde of typical South Indian passengers boarded the plane. Not well-versed in the Western style of living, these passengers were ill-treated by the crew on that flight. I saw at least one crew member openly grimace with distaste at the way an old man (dressed in the South Indian veshti) was eating his meal with his fingers, ignoring the cutlery on his tray. Yes, I know that such eating habits on an aircraft can cause a mess and a cleanliness issue but I doubt that the crew member in question was grimacing for that reason. She was looking down on that old man.
Lata Subramanian (A Dance with the Corporate Ton: Reflections of a Worker Ant)
On board the plane to Edinburgh, Benedict made his standpoint clear. When a journalist asked him whether the church should urgently do something to become more attractive, he answered with a plain ‘No’. The church did not sell anything, least of all itself. It was not entrusted with goods but with a message, which it had to pass on in full.
Peter Seewald (Benedict XVI: A Life Volume Two: Professor and Prefect to Pope and Pope Emeritus 1966–The Present)
We boarded the plane hoping the trip would give us a tomorrow, because how many days we had left were anyone’s guess.
Bobby Underwood (Passage to Tomorrow)
they board unmarked planes known by the acronym JANET—Joint Air Network Transpiration. Only
Addison Moore (Country Cottage Mysteries: Books 1-3)
At the Barcelona airport just before boarding the plane, Agha Shahid Ali was asked by a guard if he was carrying anything that could be dangerous to the other passengers. He pressed his hand to his chest and said,"only my heart".
Anonymous
You’ll be flying along when it will suddenly ‘burp’, ejecting air not from the back but from the front. This is bad news, because all of a sudden you have full thrust from one side of the plane and full drag from the other. The result is a spin, and the result of that is a quiet and undignified end for the two men on board. Quiet because the crash won’t be reported – how can a plane crash if it officially ‘doesn’t exist’? – and undignified because when you hit the ground in an SR-71 they don’t bury the remains so much as hose them into the nearest drain.
Jeremy Clarkson (I Know You Got Soul: Machines with That Certain Something)
How do I go from harmlessly being on vacation for some relaxing fly-fishing to stealing an airplane and running from a man three times my size with an arsenal of weapons, to flying the plane in gale force winds with a very sick woman and three children on board?
Jeffrey Glen Grisamore (Six Days in September)
By the time the Copenhagen conference kicked off in December, it seemed that my worst fears were coming to pass. Domestically, we were still waiting for the Senate to schedule a vote on cap-and-trade legislation, and in Europe, the treaty dialogue had hit an early deadlock. We’d sent Hillary and Todd ahead of me to try to drum up support for our proposed interim agreement, and over the phone, they described a chaotic scene, with the Chinese and other BRICS leaders dug in on their position, the Europeans frustrated with both us and the Chinese, the poorer countries clamoring for more financial assistance, Danish and U.N. organizers feeling overwhelmed, and the environmental groups in attendance despairing over what increasingly looked like a dumpster fire. Given the strong odor of imminent failure, not to mention the fact that I was still busy trying to get other critical legislation through Congress before the Christmas recess, Rahm and Axe questioned whether I should even make the trip. Despite my misgivings, I decided that even a slight possibility of corralling other leaders into an international agreement overrode the fallout from a likely failure. To make the trip more palatable, Alyssa Mastromonaco came up with a skinnied-down schedule that had me flying to Copenhagen after a full day in the Oval and spending about ten hours on the ground—just enough time to deliver a speech and conduct a few bilateral meetings with heads of state—before turning around and heading home. Still, it’s fair to say that as I boarded Air Force One for the red-eye across the Atlantic, I was less than enthusiastic. Settling into one of the plane’s fat leather conference-room chairs, I ordered a tumbler of vodka in the hope that it would help me get a few hours’ sleep and watched Marvin fiddle with the controls of the big-screen TV in search of a basketball game. “Has anyone ever considered,” I said, “the amount of carbon dioxide I’m releasing into the atmosphere as a result of these trips to Europe? I’m pretty sure that between the planes, the helicopters, and the motorcades, I’ve got the biggest carbon footprint of any single person on the whole goddamn planet.” “Huh,” Marvin said. “That’s probably right.” He found the game we were looking for, turned up the sound, then added, “You might not want to mention that in your speech tomorrow.
Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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.
Lawrence Wertan (The Lost Champion)
I was put into a no-win situation by an airport gate agent. They had seen me video recording in the gate area and told me to delete the videos or I would not be allowed to board my plane. I was the last to try and board and they had closed the jetway to the airplane. My assessment of the situation was the jetway was not going to reopen regardless of what I did. As such, I opted to keep my video recordings and they canceled my ticket. The end result was the videos became really popular on social media!
Steven Magee
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!
Steven Magee
For months I had been fighting off these very words, even going so far as to board a plane to South America to outrun them. Yet they have followed me here. Trailing me all the way to the edges of Argentina and Brazil like a Pinkerton detective hot on a case. When I first speak them aloud, I stop walking, listening only to the soundtrack of the Iguazú jungle: the chitter of those birds, the “ooh-ahhs” of those little capuchin monkeys, the pulse of those majestic waterfalls reverberating through the trees. An undeniable gauntlet has just been thrown down. I know before I fully understand it that my life will forever be changed from this moment on.
Nikki Vargas (Call You When I Land)
That’s why it’s impossible not to feel like I’ve lost something special as I hand my boarding pass over to the airline employee at the gate before making my way onto the plane. But just as I’m strapping myself into my very expensively purchased seat beside Mum, I have another feeling too, and it’s a very strange one because I can’t know for sure if it’s justified, yet I still feel it, nevertheless. I have the feeling I might have just had a very lucky escape.
Daniel Hurst (My Daughter's Boyfriend (My Daughter's Boyfriend #1))
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.
Michael K. Bohn (Presidents in Crisis: Tough Decisions inside the White House from Truman to Obama)
A brick could be attached to a parachute and tossed out of an airplane, to test if it opens up properly. Well, the good news is the parachute worked as planned, but the bad news is the only other parachute on board is strapped to my back, and I’m afraid you’re going to have to return to your seat, buckle up, and assume the crash position. And while it may not be as useful as a functioning parachute, here’s a Rosary to aid you in your prayers. Also, before I jump out of the plane, I just remembered that I owe you a lot of money. Can I write you a check?

Jarod Kintz (Brick and Blanket)
plastic, metal and glass. Develop and support local community initiatives and social networks that work together for the welfare of people, animals and the environment in the area where you live. Support complementary medicine, mindfulness practices, exercise and a sustainable lifestyle. Check ingredients in food, shampoos, and so on. Avoid junk food, cigarettes and all recreational drugs. Right Travel: Only use air travel, if at all, to serve others or to go to new destinations to change one’s life such as the monastery, the ashram, retreat centre, the rainforest, a pilgrimage, a visit to sacred places and through direct contact with nature. Use flights to reconnect with loved ones. If wealthy or the most senior of monks, still turn right when you step on board the plane and use economy class! Go camping or walking and take vacations in your own area. Minimise holiday hotels, beach resorts and flights for the pursuit of pleasure. Right Co-operation: Organisations and institutes need to co-operate together in the task of inquiry into all the key areas that make up our daily
Christopher Titmuss (The Political Buddha)
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.
Matt Smith (Dear Bob and Sue)
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James transfers our attention from substance to process, from a concept of self to the process of selving, from the concept of truth to the process of truing (as a carpenter with a plane “trues” or “trues up” a board), from a trust in concepts to an interest in percepts or perceptions.16 James is arguing that it is relations between things that matter, not objects or subjects as such.
Robert D. Richardson Jr. (William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism)
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How to Update a Passenger Name on an Frontier Airlines Booking (2025)
Boarding my plane at JFK, I promised myself that if he gave in, gave up, and fell with sweetness into my bed, he would live for me to tell the tale. If he didn't, I would tell a different tale. It was all up to him, you see, whether he lived or died. It was his body, his choice.
Chelsea G. Summers (A Certain Hunger)
Sometimes it feels like when I boarded that plane to fly to America I left my heart behind, beating and lonely on the other side of the ocean.
Jasmine Warga (Other Words for Home)
because of the noise of the wind. The crew tried to move Nelson so that Mathies could take the left seat, away from the shot-out window, but they stopped suddenly when they realized he was still alive, hanging by a thread. When they reached Polebrook, Truemper radioed the control tower. “The copilot is dead. The pilot we think is dead. The bombardier has jumped. I am the navigator, the only commissioned officer on board. What should we do?” Truemper said Mathies believed he could land the plane, and Col. Eugene Romig, the
Donald L. Miller (Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany)
Before I could knock on the open door of his office I heard, “Get your ass in here!!”      I by-passed the knock and went straight to his desk and stopped front and center.      “Christ, what the hell is going on out there this morning.  I come in here drop my cover and car keys on my desk, look at the morning availability report and see we got 13 aircraft up.  I go down to the ready room to get a cup of coffee, see on the schedules board we got an 8 plane launch going out, look at the weather, shoot the shit with the ODO for a couple minutes and by the time I get back to my office, I got 4 aircraft up out of 18 and the entire launch has been scrubbed, what the FUCK?!”      “The thunderstorm got us Sir.  Flight line had the aircraft all ready to go, canopies up waiting on pilots and everything got drenched before we could close up and run for cover.”      “Oh for Christ’s sake, didn’t anyone notice a huge thunderstorm heading our way?
W.R. Spicer (Sea Stories of a U.S. Marine Book 4 Harrier)
Many components begin to test themselves; warnings arise then quickly clear. Electrons begin to flow through the nerve-wires, hurrying light to the distant wingtips or returning with news of the quantity of fuel on board or the present outside temperature, as the plane awakens to its purpose. My
Mark Vanhoenacker (Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot)
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Flight Delay Compensation
face as the old man tensed again while the plane bumped along. “George, it’s all right. Just a little turbulence.” He took a deep breath and finally eyed her squarely. “I’m on a couple of boards of companies headquartered in New York. Have to go up twice a year.” Sidney glanced back at her documents, suddenly remembering something. She frowned. There was a mistake on the fourth page. That would need to be corrected when she got into
David Baldacci (Total Control)
begin with a quotation from 1950. The world was a much simpler place back then. Television was in black and white. Jet planes were still to enter passenger service. The silicon transistor was yet to be invented. And there were fewer than a dozen computers in existence worldwide.1 Each was a glorious combination of vacuum tubes, relays, plug boards and capacitors that filled a room.
Toby Walsh (It's Alive!: Artificial Intelligence from the Logic Piano to Killer Robots)
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.
Sonya Renee Taylor (The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love)
I boarded the plane and kept writing, unable to stop. the ink flowing to the blank pages to the book were my lifeline. My IV, my only escape from collapsing. In that moment I understood something about my writer husband, that i had never understood before: i had a small glimpse on the act of writing something down as a direct, very viable escape from pain. I had no desire to publish this writing, I wasn´t thinking about an audience. I just needed to do it. Or else I´d weep and not being able to stop weeping. For the first time I experienced the physical truth of what was it like to dwell in the act of creation as an escape hatch from an unbearable reality.
Amanda Palmer (The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help)
What would happen if, once back home, I stayed open to possibilities rather than attach to specific outcomes? What if I dreaded no potential storms? Ruminated over no past transgression? I knew how. For decades the reflex kicked in with each plane ride. The more I pondered these questions – How could I cultivate the habit of taking life as it comes? How can I immerse myself in living, like I’m on vacation on all the time, without boarding a plane or crossing a border? – the more I recognized the arbitrariness of the dichotomy between life and travel.
Gina Greenlee (Belly Up: Surviving and Thriving Beyond a Cruise Gone Bad)
They had met through the Cancer Center. Vivian had used her connection with Laura, who was on the center’s board of directors, to get him access to candidates to carry the phones on the planes. He needed men who were terminally ill and had financial worries. Vivian had told Laura that a fellow Carnegie Mellon alumnus wanted to set up a fund to help cancer patients with their expenses.
Melissa F. Miller (Irreparable Harm (Sasha McCandless, #1))
It wasn't until she was on the ramp leading to the plane that she realized what she'd left behind. Her bangle, the one she never removed, the one Kaushik had hooked his finger through that first night, drawing her to him. She saw it now in her mind, sitting in the gray plastic tray she'd placed it in before passing through the security gate. She turned around, began walking in the opposite direction, back to the woman who had taken her boarding pass.
Anonymous
Then, some years ago, on a promotional tour in Australia, I had to carry a stuffed Paddington everywhere I went. Each time I boarded a plane I knew it wouldn’t be long before he would be asked up to the flight deck. On one occasion I left him up there, strapped into a spare bucket seat while the crew explained the controls. A little later on I received a second message asking if I would mind him staying up there because he wanted to practise landing the plane. I didn’t tell the other passengers!
Anonymous
a team of suspected terrorists had boarded an aircraft in London that they were going to hi-jack.  Their target aircraft was a new 747 Jumbo Jet.  The terrorists didn’t realize the aircraft had been switched to a smaller 707 until after they were aboard and the aircraft was taxing.  Airline officials said they had planted a note in the first class bathroom notifying the Captain of their intent to take over the plane.  Sources also revealed that once they realized the aircraft wasn’t a 747 they tried to retrieve the note but it was too late, a stewardess had accidentally discovered it during the climb out while the fasten seat belt lights were still on and people weren’t allowed to move around the cabin.  The aircraft had been diverted to Shannon, and British authorities had taken ten suspected terrorists into custody.  After a slight delay, the aircraft had continued to the United States without further incident.      Marguerite and I looked at one another for several seconds.  She broke into a grin and said, “Well, looks like we sure dodged the bullet on that one and it will make a great story for our grandchildren.”      “Yes, it will.  I wonder if we’d ever known what happened if we hadn’t just happened to catch that news broadcast.
W.R. Spicer (Sea Stories of a U.S. Marine Book 3 ON HER MAJESTY'S SERVICE)
...he must look away from it all and he stares up at the darkening sky, at the ribbons of fiery red dressing the mountains, at the white stars above starting to shine, at the blinking blue lights of a climbing plane. Palm Springs International Airport is nearby, but far enough away that the plane makes no sound at all, and Harry wonders where that soaring jet, that cylindrical tin balanced high up in the cold, dry stratosphere, is headed, who on board is happy, and who is not, who is heading toward something, and who is escaping, who, at the other end, will be greeted upon their arrival, and who will feel the solitariness of their lone and echoing footsteps.
Cherise Wolas (The Family Tabor)
Within one week, Tom would be overwhelmed by Japan’s circumstances. Accompanying foreign correspondents as their interpreter on a brief stop to Hiroshima, Tom felt as if the bomb “had sucked the air out of the city.” Patients—largely old men, women, and children—lay in the hospital, horribly burned, their faces covered with pus. Flies swarmed. When the correspondents quickly boarded their plane for Tokyo, “nobody spoke,” Tom said, his voice trembling decades later.
Pamela Rotner Sakamoto (Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds)
Cal studied Savvy as the C-130 sped down the runway. The plane held a half-dozen marines and supplies bound for Manda Bay. She'd chosen the seat across from him near the tail of the aircraft and donned protective headphones. Between the headphones and other passengers, there was no way for them to discuss the mission during the flight. He’d been released from the brig at two thirty in the morning and was told he’d be departing on the transport as scheduled. Savvy hadn't stopped by his CLU to offer an explanation, and he’d decided not to go to hers. He needed to sleep. They'd have time to sort things out before departure. But daylight brought no communication from her, and he’d been surprised to find himself alone in the vehicle that delivered him to the airstrip the US military shared with the international airport. He’d begun to wonder if the op would be canceled, when she arrived seven minutes before their scheduled takeoff. She’d dropped into the seat across from him with little more than a nod in his direction, donned the headphones, and cracked open a file. She stared at the papers on her lap as if they held the meaning of the universe. They reached cruising altitude. The interior was loud, but not so loud the headphones were necessary. Still, she kept them on. He’d been watching her for twenty minutes, noting that she had yet to turn a page. He’d been looking forward to seeing her. He’d wanted to check the bruises on her neck, make sure she was okay. But the concern had evaporated in the wake of her avoidance. Her utter lack of acknowledgment of what had transpired last night. He reminded himself she’d been assaulted. It was wrong of him to expect her to be rational, cool, and calm today. She’d said the man had assaulted her before, and Evers had indicated the same with his words and actions. She had the right to be messed up. If this were a normal situation. But nothing about this was normal. They were heading into a covert op, and he knew next to nothing of their plan. Worse, he needed to know if she was on her game. He needed Savannah James, Paramilitary Operations Officer for the Special Operations Group within SAD. He needed the covert operator who could do everything he could do, backward and in high heels. He didn’t know if that woman had boarded this turboprop. Flights always took longer on C-130s, and he estimated they’d be in the air about three and a half hours. Too long to wait to find out what was going on in that complex brain of hers. He unbuckled his harness and moved to the empty seat next to her. Her fingers tightened on the files in her lap. He reached over and extracted the papers from her grip and set them aside. He slid a hand down her arm and took her hand, interlocking his fingers with hers. Her hand was tight, stiff, then all at once, she relaxed and squeezed his hand. After a moment, she pulled off the protective headphones and leaned her head on his shoulder. Something in his chest shifted. He was holding hands with Savvy as she leaned on him, and it felt…right. Good. Like something he’d needed forever but hadn't known. Several marines sat too close for them to attempt conversation, and a guy sitting across the empty fuselage watched with unabashed curiosity. Cal didn't care. He liked the way she leaned on him. The way she was willing to accept comfort. The way her hand felt in his. And he was thankful he hadn't been cut from this mission, no matter how much he hadn't wanted it at first. The idea of her having to pretend to be a sexual plaything to anyone but him made his blood pressure spike. It was messed up, but he couldn't deny it. The fact that he didn't like the idea of any other man touching her—even if it was only an act—was a problem to deal with when they returned to Camp Citron. Right now, he was a soldier embarking on a mission, and as he would on any mission, he’d protect his teammate at all costs.
Rachel Grant (Firestorm (Flashpoint, #3))
The man who’d come home from war was not the same man who’d boarded the plane for Vietnam.
Kristin Hannah (The Great Alone)
Think of using only one route of influence as trying to fly on a plane with only one wing. You would never board that plane, because you know it needs two wings to get off the ground successfully. Likewise, you should sell via both routes of influence because they are what the brain uses to construct a positive buying decision. So let’s learn about this second method of influence, the central route, because once you begin intentionally selling with both routes simultaneously, your sales influence will go to an all-time high.
David Hoffeld (The Science of Selling: Proven Strategies to Make Your Pitch, Influence Decisions, and Close the Deal)
Underlying this book is the assumption that governing a company and managing it are different activities requiring different job designs. We maintain that governance is best seen as existing outside the phenomenon of management and inside the phenomenon of ownership. Governance operates at a level that transcends current issues and specific company traditions and elevates people to a higher conceptual plane, one from which accountability can be seen more clearly. Governance requires and engenders a passion for leadership, leadership that is not just over others but on others' behalf.
John Carver (Corporate Boards That Create Value: Governing Company Performance from the Boardroom (J-B Carver Board Governance Series Book 26))
Eventually, the current airline industry strategy of shameless fee charging is going to collapse under its own weight. It’s the depressing result of a product mindset that prioritizes add-ons and revenue extraction and devalues customers. What could a flying experience look like in the future? Well, to start with, it might also include cars and trains. Maybe United sends you a cobranded Uber car with a monitor that includes all your hotel and flight details, a drop-down menu to preselect all your entertainment and dining options, and light rail information for your destination city. Maybe that car’s arrival time at your house is synchronized to your flight’s actual departure time. Maybe you can start binge-watching Narcos in the car and pick it up on the plane where you left off. Maybe when you arrive at the airport, a service like Clear can speed you through security lines with a swipe of your boarding pass and a thumb scan, because all your standard ID information has already been paired with your biometric details. Maybe all these services could be wrapped up in a flat annual frequent-flier membership plan.
Tien Tzuo (Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It)
As the twilight turned to darkness, the last men got on board their planes. Eisenhower was out on the runway, calling out “Good luck!” He noticed a short private, in Eisenhower’s words “more equipment than soldier,” who snapped him a salute. Eisenhower returned it. Then the private turned to the east and called out, “Look out, Hitler. Here we come!
Stephen E. Ambrose (D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II)
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