Syzdekistan

I love flying. I took this picture just before sunset flying from Las Vegas to Phoenix on October 1, 2006. I love flying on stormy days and seeing the variety of clouds and seeing the landscape far below. I had a book, iPod, and computer with me but I sat with the face against my window and enjoyed the view outside the plane. To the curious mind, flying is a great opportunity to explore many facets of the natural world. For example, flying between Las Vegas and Reno you can often get a great look at the amazing Keystone Thrust fault. Flying into Vegas from Denver you often fly the complete 110 mile long length of Lake Mead and you realize just how huge this reservoir is (Lake Mead is the largest reservoir in the United States and it contains over 8 cubic miles of water when full). And you could see a glory.

Of course, most other people on the plane were reading, sleeping, or listening to music. One guy was waving about a purple, ahem, “marital aid,” that was festooned in chicken feathers (what happens in Vegas should stay the heck in Vegas). A few people were enjoying the view but most were not. I was a little saddened to see that people take such little joy in flying.

Just yesterday I found a great blog entry describing the joys of flying.

If you are a package of avionics software, the North Pole is a stressful place. Depending on how close by you pass, longitude and bearing can change extremely quickly (or converge into an unlucky singularity) and most autopilots throw up their hands and enforce a special wings-level lockout flight mode within a few miles of the pole, to keep from spiraling around it like a housefly circling a light bulb. Radio and satellite systems don’t have an easy time here, either. Most communication satellites orbit near the equatorial plane, down below the horizon, so a lot of the usual navigation and air traffic control links become useless. Meanwhile, the same charged particles that are zipping so copiously through the crew and passengers can also badly disrupt radio communication, to the point where sometimes the polar routes become unflyable…

Passing over the North Pole hardly helps make the experience less dreamlike. Such flights were a novelty even into the 1950’s; it’s only within the last twenty years that routine passenger service over the Arctic have become technically possible, but already people are able to pull down the window shades and calmly watch the DaVinci Code or even just sleep through the whole spectacle. It makes me wonder if there is anything we can do to help our world recover its former vastness.

Well said. Link.
(This guy, Maciej CegÅ‚owski, has some great writing on his travels on his blog, “Idle Words” Check it out.)