by Rodolfo Machirica

The Red KiteMilo found a red kite tangled in the old mango tree behind his house. Its tail was torn, and one wooden stick had snapped. He almost threw it away, but something about its bright color made him carry it insid...

Airports

by Joseph Fleckenstein

Over the years, I have been abroad on numerous occasions. Most trips were for the purpose of transacting business while others were for pleasure. As o...

Airports

by Jey Sushil

I was trying not to think, or possibly I was not in the mental state to think anymore. It had been 40 hours since I slept, arranging for my sudden fli...

Airports

by Connie Timpson

It wasn’t a matter of scary people with explosives, drugs, or even overspending without reporting. It was a matter of apples. Red ones. Jet lagg...

Airplanes

by Susana H. Case

My husband wants to make a video of me packing a suitcase for YouTube since we fly a lot. I go to my computer and learn that videos of “How to P...

Airplanes

by Hilary Sideris

Out of contact with air traffic control, we sit for hours on the tarmac at Newark, watch The Apprentice. Behind us, a man begs for water. The flight a...

Airplanes

by Al Scott Pearce Baker

To fly is to forfeit identity. What boards the plane is not what leaves it. In the sky, the self disintegrates. The body persists, but the soul enters...

Airports

by Barrie Brewer

The flight from Lima to Cusco was like something out of a horror movie. The wheelchair was a dead giveaway. Our son Goose was so weak we had to wheel...

Airports

by Aisha Piracha

You sit at the edge of your seat in the boarding area, cradling your hand luggage. You see everyone lining up like sardines all rolled up in a tin, bu...

Airports

by Marie Soubranne as told to Hyokyung Park

In January of this year, I came to the United States for my exchange semester. My father and I took a plane from Paris to New York. But just before bo...

Airplanes

by Brandon O’Deay as told to Kyla O'Deay

I work for a local Louisiana government as the head of the IT department, and something new is always happening at the office with all the characters...

Airports

by Nadir Benslimane

When I attempt to recollect my memories from my journey to France, the memories of Paris pop out vividly: winding streets down to a small corner cafe;...

Airplanes

by Tabitha Neaux as told to Max Schweikarth

I didn’t eat anything that day. Hell, I usually never eat before long flights as I have a pretty sensitive stomach. But because I didn’t e...

Airplanes

by KT Thompson

When the airplane crashed in the meadow, I was on a walk to look for birds. My torso a crosshatch of straps: binoculars, camera, sling with water and...

Airports

by Emani Leefort

Six thirty a.m. at the Louis Armstrong International Airport. Who books a flight for that early in the morning? Answer: a scholarship foundation. Once...

Airports

by Vivien Marx

My suitcase is far too plump but it closes and the zipper is strong. Some travelers manage a long trip with two t-shirts, three pieces of underwear, a...

Airplanes

by Grace Campbell

To compensate for the worst summer of my life, my mother sent me to Los Angeles with my older sister. We drove together and then I flew home alone. I...

Airplanes

by HyoKyung Park

About a month ago, I took a flight from Korea to San Francisco to start my exchange program in New Orleans. Since there was no direct flight to New Or...

Airports

by Claire Mitchell

Most people go through childhood viewing their parents as human adjacent. As a kid I thought my parents never had a human emotion until they drank too...

Airplanes

by Joelitza E. Arroyo-Ramirez

At 4 a.m. on December 31st, the airport was eerily quiet except for the occasional sound of luggage wheels clicking against the tile floor. I was drag...

Airports

by Alyx Marroquin

I’m convinced that airplanes, airports, and everything to do with them exist out of time. They are liminal spaces that hold everything transitor...

Airplanes

by Morgan Matteson

Pilots are traditionally buried in their uniforms, cap in hands. This is something I learned preceding my step-grandfather's funeral. He had been...

Airports

by Miller Nichols

We had always driven out there. A two-day road trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico, was a regular, biannual pilgrimage for me and my family to visit my dad&r...

Airports

by Noah Rozzell

Many people get nervous when traveling. The feeling of impending doom starts to bubble up, and images of lost bags, missed connections, and crashed pl...

Airplanes

by Max Schweikarth

I wouldn’t have been in this situation had I not touched that guitar. Earlier that day I had picked it up from this hidden repair shop off of Oa...

Airports

by Damari Esqueda

I remember only two things from the first time I rode in an airplane. One: my mom took two dramamine that knocked her out, a precaution so her eardrum...

Airports

by Mae Bennett

I concealed some shame for a very long time for not having left America in my first twenty-two years. (Champagne problems, I know.) When my friends be...

Airports

by Phoebe Swetish

Supposedly, there is a law stating that every word in the Icelandic language must contain at least one acute accent, indicating an elongated or emphas...

Airports

by Erin Murphy

Model plane, plane delay. Butterfly net, net income. Kite string, string theory. You have a knapsack packed with every reason for whiskey: a woman who...

Airports

by Drew Payne

The airport’s hand soap had only been used to scrub my hands and forearms, just below the elbows, but its cloying scent lingered as if I had bat...

Airplanes

by Erik Bittner

It’s pinned to the plaster ceiling over my desk, which my wife doesn’t like so much, but I put it there so I could look up and always see...

Airplanes

by Anne Graue

Whenever I fly from New York to Kansas or Cyprus, I know the planes will rise, large chunks of metal will move into the air, first on the ground, then...

Airports

by Parker Emerson

We arrive at the United Airlines counter at Southern California's Ontario International Airport three hours before the scheduled 10:56 a.m. depart...

Airplanes

by Jodi Goforth

My first flight instructor was an asshole. His name was Boris, which should tell you enough. His one redeeming act, however, was when he showed me 10,...

Airplanes

by Amy Holman

We are flying north, near six o’clock. I’ve got a window seat behind the angled wing. On the open fold table is my tiny cold press noteboo...

Airports

by Pavle Radonic

At the terminal and passing the boutiques the adjustment was always needed for the frequent flyers. First-classers even, if not A-listers, might be sp...

Airports

by Cross McCoy

There is nothing that can soothe the mind-grating experience of standing in a line, served through the system like slop through troughs, then ordered...

Airplanes

by Barrie Cole

I was on a plane once a long time ago, and the woman sitting next to me had never been on a plane before.  She was young, perhaps nineteen or so,...

Airplanes

by Carole Greenfield

There is so much about flying that she loves. When the turbulence dissolves and the plane is flying smoothly again. She's never taken drugs but te...

Airports

by Pavle Radonic

For a fellow who had missed FOUR internat. flights, 2 ½ hrs early by the gate was A-OK. At the boutiques along the corridors the ice-cold starl...

Airports

by Elaine Joy Edaya Degale

I purchased last-minute tickets to Cuba. This was my first solo-trip. I started writing this in Miami when I was on a ten-hour layover from my long, a...

Airports

by Crockett Doob

Sometimes you date your opposite. This is common enough. My parents are opposites. My mom the talker; my dad not. This woman I dated was a lot like my...

Airports

by Pavle Radonic

Touch over 35mins on clear, open freeways in Jakarta on a Saturday; as soon as we cleared Thamrin City it was a breeze. As a consequence there would b...

Airplanes

by Emma J. Voigt

My body is being shaken about, but it’s a perfect day. It has to be. With nothing more than a warm breeze, the cloudless sky is safe.  I lo...

Trips

by Terry Borst

It’s long been accepted mythology that the classic Byrds' song "Eight Miles High" is about being stoned—maybe about an acid...

Airplanes

by Scott Knoll

This story takes place sometime in the early 90’s, when the internet was still associated with that horrible dial-up sound and when comic books...

Airports

by Eleni Stephanides

At the table next to me inside the airport restaurant, I hear a brother explain what braces are to his younger sister. A blond boy with short legs hol...

Airports

by Natalie Elward

I have a love-hate relationship with airports. Mostly hate, if I’m being honest. I appreciate the grandeur of being able to travel such great di...

Airports

by Sophia Lyons

It was early in the morning and the sky was still asleep. Generally, I had two to three more hours of sleep. It was so early even the birds were aslee...

Airplanes

by Pavle Radonic

Squeezed in the middle. Point of honour not to hog the rests. Window French chap; aisle Indo domestic going back to her kampung for a fortnight. Both...

Airplanes

by Scott Saalman

Leveling at 30,000 feet after departing LaGuardia Airport, our jet was jostled. We represented nothing but a tubular chew toy in the jaws of a mastica...

Airplanes

by Gavin Garza

Dad texts me before my flight and asks if the airport brings back memories of Vegas. I lie, and say yes. It’s been ten years since I left the st...

Airplanes

by Rossana G. D’Antonio

My plane was screaming down the runway...or was that me screaming. The little Cessna’s wings wavered and bounced slightly as we gained speed. My...

Airports

by Charles J. March III

At the airport, a man sat down to empty his bowels before boarding, and self-consciously questioning whether he should release his initial gas like a...

Airplanes

by Judy Chaikin

I usually sit on the aisle, but this flight from Cabo San Lucas to L.A. was sold out, so there I was trapped in a window seat and feeling claustrophob...

Airports

by Won Lee

Almost missed my flight to Portland. Woke up at 730 in the morning, triple-checked Benjamin's flat for forgotten items, lugged/dragged my much-too...

Airports

by Joan Potter

In a wooden jewelry box on my bedroom dresser, along with some old beads, a bunch of unmatched earrings, and a broken wristwatch, is a metal coin bear...

Airports

by Nadine Dolby

I hurry towards the gate at JFK. This is a journey I have made many times, and I feel a rush of anticipation and excitement as I begin to hear more an...

Airplanes

by Gina Forberg

The tray table is in its upright position and the seat belt light screams red and I would like nothing more than to go to the bathroom, but the flight...

Airports

by Yvonne Osborne

He was slim and well-dressed with a nice haircut, not too short, not too long. He wore a black tailored jacket and well-made jeans. His black leather...

Airplanes

by Jason Weiss

What could be more peculiar than flying in an airplane? No matter how many hundreds of times we’ve joined the procession to file into that big m...

Airports

by James Robertovich

I had made sure my coins, masks, wallet, and all were in my backpack, leaving “nothing but air” in my pockets, as the TSA agent commanded....

Airports

by Ellen Beldner

Twelve years ago I swore a blood oath to never again fly British Airways. Do you know what it feels like to have a urinary tract infection? You have a...

Airports

by Stephanie R. Pearmain

The first time I boarded a plane to Honolulu, it was a one-way ticket and I cried most of the flight. I’d just turned 15 and while more than onc...

Airplanes

by Alex Ehrenzeller

Despite my advice, Captain Juanito felt prepared to take a midnight flight. It was dangerous enough just standing in the stockroom. Why my cousin deci...

Airplanes

by Scott Zukowski

I wake in an altered state as we descend from Phoenix into JFK. My cylinders fire, my spindles spin, my cogs turn, but the time surrounding the machin...

Airplanes

by Sara Barnett

The Great American South, till now, remained a mystery, one that blurredly conjured thickset women in rolled down stockings fanning themselves in the...

Airplanes

by Bonnie Boyles

The adolescent seatmate plunked down in the narrow seat next to me on the plane bound for Phoenix. The electronic game was immediately taken from its...

Airports

by Suzanne Weerts

I literally missed the train by one croissant from the breakfast buffet stuffed in my purse, one hand heart-directed at my daughter as I went down one...

Airports

by Crystal Byers

I’m not a frequent flyer. Sometimes I forget the rules. As I approached the security checkpoint at George Bush Intercontinental, I removed all i...

Airplanes

by Michelle Goering

Propped up in bed with the 1918 Spanish flu, Lydia Burkholder of Nappanee, Indiana, sighed restlessly. An Amish ten-year-old and my eventual grandmoth...

Airplanes

by Laura Taylor

The early morning light made long tree shadows below us. I took the card out of the pocket of the seat in front of me. It said we were on a Vickers Vi...

Airlines

by Margo Stutts Toombs

In the summer of 1974, I performed my final flight attendant duties with an extra bounce in my step, knowing it would be my last time to serve rubbery...

Airplanes

by William Stobb

Boarded but stuck in a delay at the gate, I see that one of my ex’s posted a picture of her Bible in sunlight on her old wooden table—some...

Airports

by Jehan Ramadan

A few years ago I was working at an airline lounge when a mother and her two grown daughters approached me at the front desk. Whoever said good things...

Airplanes

by Jehan Ramadan

I sat next to a woman and her eight-year old daughter on a cross-country flight one day. That's not that long, you may think, but by the time we l...

Airplanes

by Mark Chesnut

Are you a teenage boy who doesn’t quite fit in? Self-conscious about your stringy red hair, pale skin, girlish walk and lackluster reputation at...

Airports

by Gail Brady

For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated with travel, perhaps a manifestation of my Celtic-Gypsy soul. Even in utero I was transported acr...

Airplanes

by Anthony DeVita

It was a rainy winter night when I made my way toward the back of the Boeing 747. As the line of people before me struggled to stuff their outrageousl...

Airlines

by Kay Bontempo

To the Customer Service Department at United Airlines: My sincere apologies for missing my scheduled flight from Chicago to Puerto Vallarta (with layo...

Airplanes

by Rebecca Evans

I was about to push faster than the speed of sound, something the human body was not designed to endure. Especially mine. Only twenty, I weighed 100 p...

Airports

by Bridget Smith

When you fly on anything smaller than a jet, I have news for you: you are cargo. And as cargo, what you weigh is crucial. In Alaska where I live, smal...

Airports

by Anyonita Green

Somewhen between 9/11 and the last global recession, European airlines offered flights at tantalisingly low prices. Every Tuesday, RyanAir, EasyJet an...

Airports

by Victoria Houser

When the plane left Terminal C at Ted Stevens International Airport, it traveled over 18 years of silent longing and hidden assault. As we gradually p...

Airplanes

by George Fotheringham

My nose recoiled as I lowered my head under the airplane door. The air smelt how the interior of the Spirit flight looked, cramped and stale. The fron...

Airports

by Jade Arvizu

It’s going to be different this time. You’ll be ok. Breath. Don’t be afraid! Don’t cry! This is my travel mantra. Internally o...

Airplanes

by Joseph Sigurdson

I’d been traveling for nine fuckin hours in a suit and tie. The suit and tie was just a facade. I had no money. I pulled nickels out of the couc...

Airplanes

by Holly Hein

We flew off into the most spectacular sunset over the front range with the Denver lights spread out in twinkling patterns below. That winter there was...

Airplanes

by Gabriel Meek

With flying you rarely know who will be seated next to you until, well, they’re seated next to you. It could be a priest who gives you a dollar...

Airplanes

by Stewart Sinclair

Whenever I sit down on a plane, I resign myself to death. It’s the only way I can reconcile my fear of flying with the fact that I have had to d...

Trips

by Julian Hanna

It's a warm January morning and I'm heading to the airport in an old yellow diesel Mercedes taxi driven by one of my students. I spent the pre...

Trips

by Elizabeth H. Boquet

Newsfeeds tripped across the flat screen in my basement the nights after Katrina slammed ashore, and I found myself a thousand miles away from the pla...

Airplanes

by Sandra A. Miller

I boarded the plane and settled into 26A, a window seat next to an empty one. And that’s the first time I felt it in my gut—the uncoupling...

by Susan Dillon Tschudi

The winter of 1973 was harsh in the Midwest but that particular January day was especially unforgiving. Delayed by a blinding snowstorm, our beleaguer...

Airplanes

by Andrew Chinich

I’m not sure when I realized the depth of my love of flying but I got hooked early and it’s lasted a lifetime. In 1941, my father was just...

Death

by Avery Keatley

I had made a rather serious mistake. A few weeks before my family’s first-ever overseas vacation, when I would be strapped into a Dreamliner for...

Airports

by Richard Klin

The Lufthansa flight from Milan, bound ultimately for New York, was crowded and uncomfortable. I needed to switch planes in Frankfurt, which elicited...

Airplanes

by Sheila Sundar

In the winter of 2009, two days before my son was born, I walked my father the four miles from the door of my Brooklyn apartment, across the Manhattan...

Airports

by Chris Brauer

I love traveling. The more I travel, the more I want to experience the world and meet new people. But I’m not good at traveling. While I li...

Airplanes

by Stirling Noh

I've given up trying to sleep on airplanes. A cat nap here and there? Sure, and they come easily if you drink the way I do. But the whole theatre...

by Saanya Ali

An airport. Some see it as a nuisance, I see it as a story. Airports are places of new beginnings and long-awaited ends, arrivals and departures,...

Airplanes

by Melanie J. Mendenhall

My three-year-old wants to fly. Not in an airplane. She’s done that dozens of times, and that’s not at all what she means. She wants to ha...

Airports

by Tomoé Hill

Speak to me of love; I will speak to you of wings. The too-bright rising sun glinting on metal; sharp angles cutting through clouds; the mechanical so...

Airplanes

by Maryann Aita

In a time before WI-FI on airplanes, my nineteen-year-old self was thrilled to have a nonstop flight from New York to Phoenix to visit my parents. I w...

Airplanes

by Kathy Doherty

Our family had moved to one of the beckoning Chicago suburbs in the 1960s. Mom took a job in a typing pool at a large oil company nearby and my stepda...

Airplanes

by Milt Montague

We were flying home after spending several enchanting days in San Jose, Costa Rica, a tiny republic just north of the Panama Canal and south of Mexico...

Airplanes

by Sarah Scarborough

I woke up with slight confusion to the feeling of a sharp, quick, but non-painful touch to my head; I had been hit by an unidentified flying object. I...

Airplanes

by Georgia Knapp

The locals were wrapped in parkas, hats, and gloves. Anna and I wore t-shirts, jeans, and cardigans slung across our arms. It was early afternoon. The...

Airplanes

by McKenna Castleberry

Boarding a plane is a lot like going to church. You go into a room full of pews or chairs with people you don’t know. Typically you feel antsy,...

Airplanes

by Carole Lee

So this isn't going to be some sentimental airplane story that'll make you feel something in your heart and inspire you to put your best foot...

by Barbara Rady Kazdan

Travel by air should be a time of leisure; a chance to escape your humdrum worries. —1950’s airline promotion, National Air Science Museum...

Airports

by Dan Morey

All flights from Erie, Pennsylvania, depart from the clumsily titled Erie International Airport Tom Ridge Field. Not only does this name fail to roll...

Airports

by Paul C. Dalmas

You know the moment. Bleary-eyed from a long air trip, you slouch at the baggage carousel with your fellow passengers sharing a single unspoken questi...

Airplanes

by Peter Bracking

I am a space-race child. I was an Elroy. From a very young age I was aware of the sky. The television and radio were filled with spacecraft and astron...

Airports

by Michaela Brady

My last breath of outside had not yet swept through my lungs before I found myself inside yet again. After wiggling out of the leather-scented headach...

Airplanes

by Benjamin Rietema

As I writing these words, I’m sitting in a small aluminum tube about 38,000 feet above the frigid waters of the Pacific—where I’m su...

Airports

by Richard Kiln

The Lufthansa flight from Milan, bound ultimately for New York, was crowded and uncomfortable. I needed to switch planes in Frankfurt, which elicited...

Airports

by Tom McCarron

Thoughts of kickflips and 50/50 grinds slid through my mind as if on a polished granite ledge. The thoughts flipped and spun and twisted my head into...

Airplanes

by L. V. Vehaskari

“Quick, Mama. Lift up your foot.” “I can’t,” Mama sputtered. “This seat doesn’t give me any room. What are y...

Airports

by Chris Wiewiora

At arrivals, a man stood with his chest out. His middle stretched against his seaweed green wool sweater. The man smiled at Dad. “Czesc, Zdzichu...

Airports

by Alina Stefanescu

SCENARIO A young pregnant female stands in the security line at Birmingham International Airport. She works at a DC nonprofit but flies back to Alabam...

Airports

by Hanna Maxwell

Hour three in the Newark airport. I could see the skyline of New York from Terminal C. We’d landed after turbulence and clouds that looked as if...

Airplanes

by Madeleine Feola

My fingers wind their way into my earbud cord, faded bluish and dreamlike in the dim glow of the seatback screen. Wrapping the black wire around my th...

Airports

by Ben Read

The only time I’ve ever eaten McDonald’s without feeling guilt was in the Denver Airport. I was hungry. The hash browns were good. Who car...

Airplanes

by Andrew Arnett

I settled into my seat on board China Ailrines flight 1133 and opened the complimentary China Daily to the article "Today is the Most Balanced Da...

Airports

by Scott Saalman

So, everyone has boarded our transoceanic aircraft at O’Hare. The flight safety message has started. It’s the kind you watch on TV monitor...

Airplanes

by Kathryn Kohnert

We stored small roller bags in the bins above row twenty-three, then settled into our seats and exchanged names, places of origin, and reasons for tra...

Airplanes

by Amy Gutierrez

I watch as the man chews. He chews big, big, big and then tiny (chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp). He bites into the gooey cheese sandwich, jaws locking and...

Airplanes

by Jennifer Wagley

I enter relationships the same way I enter planes. I settle in quickly and then immediately begin searching for emergency exits, planning an escape ro...

Airports

by Lisa Kay Adam

As our flight lifted over the city, he thought he could pick out which house was his friend's, the one with the swimming pool—among house af...

Airports

by Mark Edwin Jenkins

I’m on my way back to Poland, where I’ve been a dozen times designing Western-style shopping malls in Eastern Europe. Flying from my home...

by Raymond Pun

From a museum library to a prison library, I’ve worked in all kinds of libraries.  I’ve also traveled to many countries such as the U...

Airplanes

by Greta Foltos

Not many people are willing to jump out of a plane with nothing but some cloth and string strapped to their backs. Of those who are willing, almost al...

by Kron Vollmer

“A ukulele,” said the Australian in the seat next to me, eyeing the instrument peeking out of my carry-on. “If we’re stuck her...

by Christopher Shipman

At the airport a pregnant mother tries to pick her toddler up by the hair on his head. I wish it were me glaring up at his pissed-off mother’s s...

by Lauren NuDelman

I’ve been in plenty of uncomfortable situations on airplanes before: the requisite overweight passenger suffocating my comfort zone, or the squa...

by Sean Talbot

26 April 2013 Dear Heeth, My fifth annual pilgrimage to a remote fishing village on the far edge of the world—Bristol Bay—ends and begins...

by Bernard Barnes

Airplane travel, I realize, is all about tension and release. It begins even before you leave the house. You pack your bags and agonize over what to b...

by Emily Grant

Flying in a plane is pretty simple, really. If you’re a coach flyer, it’s cramped and stuffy, the person next to you is too big, the one b...

by Phillip Barron

"Thrust and lift," says the sexual sounding diorama diagramming how planes keep up in the air in the metropolitan museum of science and indu...

by Aaron Gilbreath

Sitting on a bench in downtown Portland, Oregon, a man asked for a cigarette. When I handed him one, he lowered himself beside me. He wore jean shorts...

Airports

by Susan Harlan

I always see soldiers in airports. This is just about the only place I see them. I see them in the Charlotte Douglas airport, especially around the ho...

Airports

by Lauren NuDelman

I’ve been in plenty uncomfortable situations on airplanes before: the requisite overweight passenger suffocating my comfort zone, or the squalli...

Airplanes

by Matthew Vollmer

Forgive us, O LORD, for not looking, for averting our eyes, for opening the Sky Mall magazine even though we couldn’t truly be said to be intere...

Airplanes

by Lara Lillibridge

When you fly at a thousand feet, you see the world differently. Commercial planes fly at an anonymous altitude, so far up that houses become invisible...

Airplanes

by Lara Lillibridge

I fly a lot. Not, perhaps, as much as a flight attendant or member of congress, but probably more than a lot of people. I will take any opportunity to...

Airplanes

by Dean Miller

As my flight from Colorado to Oregon descended over the Columbia River, I noticed a fly buzzing about the cabin. The aircraft’s flight originate...

Airports

by Miles Stearns

I was young and asleep and dreaming of things which get lost upon waking. It had been a long day in the Mexico City airport. My asthma acted up almost...

Airplanes

by James Stafford

“Pay attention, boy! Get on the other side so we can push her out.” I skittered under the belly of the darkened airplane and grabbed her s...

Airplanes

by Kassia Halcli

I’ve been the girl vomiting uncontrollably in the aisle seat beside you. I’ve been the girl with a stack of barf bags handed up to her by...

Airplanes

by Luanne Castle

The worst part of flying with a newly reconstructed foot is finding the right seat. I cross my fingers that the people on board since the last stop ar...

Airplanes

by Sandra Park

A layover is a lay without sleep or sex. Like a silent sled, the red tram zips from domestic to international gates, transport without a sense of dire...

Airplanes

by James Moran

Of the throngs of humanity sleeping on cots by the heat-blasted roadside our flashing honking careening bus disturbed not a soul. We had witnessed thi...

Airplanes

by Deborah Elder

Sitting on the lid of the toilet I check the bars of my phone and dial his number. This is the usual spot, less static on the line and the only place...

Airplanes

by Margaret Goerig

There are moments; do we all know these moments? You're flying. You're at 35,000 feet, or something like it, and there are clouds—so man...

Airports

by Bobby Schweizer

Looking at the bustling bodies in an airport or the rows of seated passengers in a plane, it would seem that air travel is about people. People take b...

Airplanes

by Shannon Guerreso

My cell phone was ringing: number unknown. What do we have here? I wondered excitedly. A friend in the premature throes of separation angst? A former...

Airports

by Merrill Sunderland

All around me is the snap, crackle, pop, sigh, hiss, shloop, and swoosh of air. In this airplane, I’m vacuum-sealed like packaged meat, yet air...

Airplanes

by Michael Martone

The Indianapolis department store,* When, commissioned Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, to address the sky above the Indianapolis Motor Speedway...

Airplanes

by Michael Martone

Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, attempting to elope with his fiancée, Aimee Cour, escaping from Fort Wayne to Hillsdale, Michigan, where...

Airplanes

by Chloe Olewitz

I try to make conversation with the furred woman who takes too long to arrange herself to my right in the window seat next to me, I fail. I reach down...

Airports

by Kevin M. Flanagan

I first visited Pittsburgh in Summer 2003. When the friend who was hosting me asked what I wanted to see, the only thing I can remember mentioning was...

Airports

by Jennifer Ng

I never planned to carry the laptop. The 15” Macbook Pro was intended to be left on my desk at work—like a dying patient perched on a tran...

Airports

by Jennifer Weitman

It was that damn kid. That crying baby did it. The couple next to me—tanned and ugly—argued about the hot sauce they’d have to throw...

Airports

by Patrici Flores

I’m either an idiot, or I enjoy the surprises that come from terrible planning. My ego much prefers the latter as an excuse for my hastiest deci...

Airports

by Amanda Williams

The Korean cab driver is missing half of his teeth, has chew stuck in his bottom lip, and reeks of Kimchi, the fermented cabbage that sits in the sun...

Airplanes

by Neal Pollack

I’m betraying my age by revealing this, but I’ve always loved the Saturday Night Live film from the early 80s where Eddie Murphy goes unde...

Airplanes

by Whitney Mackman

I am a frequent flyer and frequently a problem flyer. Security has asked me to step into “special” screening lines so many times that I ha...

Airplanes

by Jessica Shepherd

I stare into my computer screen trying to do the reading that my university has so thoughtfully assigned before the semester has even begun. I lose fo...

Airports

by Koty Neelis

I rush to my gate only to realize I have an extra 45 minutes to waste. I sit down, fidgeting nervously. Children are screaming. I hear languages I don...

Airplanes

by Brian Oliu

If only we could fly like they do—things that I cannot imagine, all things platinum, women in clothes that I designed in a dream, comfort withou...

Airplanes

by Barbara Benjamin

The face of travel has changed dramatically. Rules have shifted south, as prices have continuously flown upward. It takes a patient person to fly the...

Airports

by Nathan C. Martin

I remember passing a Nalgene bottle—a popular outdoor accoutrement in the West—full of Red Bull and vodka around the car on the way to Sal...

Airplanes

by Deborah Elder

“He gets airsick” she chirps, handing over his duffle and walking away. I show him how to work the seatbelt, put him where I can see him,...

Airplanes

by José Duarte

I am neither an adventurer nor a traveler. I like things that are secure, that you can take for granted. But that is not life, which is why we need to...

Airplanes

by Erica Garza

The first time I fell in love with a fellow passenger was in 2002. It happened on a tiny plane that I boarded at the Houston airport (a layover from L...

Airplanes

by Lawrence Weill

We had taken trains all up and down the eastern seaboard, and as true baby-boomers we had traveled across the country several times by car, but I had...

Airports

by Naomi Bryant

For my dad (1963-2011), who flew away....   We settled down at the east end of the airport, waiting for the next flight. Everything was quiet. It...

Airplanes

by Lucy Corin

Some bored friend of mine had driven me to the airport and we talked about boredom. We felt it but remained skeptical about it defining our generation...

Airplanes

by Liz Stephens

I don’t think the ink on my brother’s shirt had dried on the day that I flew in a small single-engine plane for the first time. New pilots...

Airplanes

by Margaret O'Brien

“Bet you don’t know what they’re saying,” the Frenchman said to me in accented English as he clicked on the laptop that sat on...

Airplanes

by Jacob Dodson

The plane did not have an engine explode shortly after takeoff, which would have forced us into the Pacific Ocean and forced me to quickly grab a plas...

Airplanes

by Kurt Mullen

One thing nice about space is it keeps going.                  &n...

Airplanes

by Jocelyn Kerr

I had experienced turbulence before. I never minded turbulence. I'm not the praying type, and I don't frighten easily. I don't Hail Mary o...

Airports

by Kevin Haworth

We will not cross paths with the bodies.  We are due at Ben Gurion airport in just a few hours, and we are deep into the final busy-ness of movin...

Airports

by Anna Hearn

I have lost track of the many, many miles I have clocked in the air and at various airports around the world. Some airports, Singapore Changi Airport...

Airports

by Gaia Veenis

“You’re traveling into the future,” my friend typed into a Facebook chat box before I embarked on the 17-hour journey across the int...

Airports

by Stefani Cox

One look at the situation and I knew I could outsmart TSA. The body scanner stood in the middle of the room like the rude intruder at a party who ever...

Airports

by JP Hatcher

Though I have always been a steadfast athlete and competitor, I lack grace in my day-to-day endeavors. Perhaps it is because my anxious mind is always...

Airports

by Nicole Lee

I could see airplanes landing and taking off in a steady stream as we approached the airport. Jumbo jets thundering in from their long haul across the...

Airports

by Fredric Stanley

I had been standing in the departure area, leaning against a column right in front of the boarding gate, when I noticed my flight's status change...

Airplanes

by Marsha Temlock

The tall thin man with the wispy white beard proceeded his wife down the aisle. He was schlepping two black suitcases and a round black hatbox; she gr...

Airports

by Anita Breland

My first impressions of India are also nearly my last. I have arrived in Mumbai on a sultry January evening, after an eight-hour flight from wintry Zu...

Airplanes

by Hannah Griggs

Let me start out by expressing how much I hate flying. Three years ago I had a bad experience falling from a cliff while on vacation, leaving me with...

Airports

by Anca L. Szilágyi

I’m a firm believer in write-what-you-desperately-want-to-know. Research, empathize, repeat. It’s not impossible to write beyond your own...

Airports

by Lisa McKenzie

I don’t remember the airport and I don’t remember the year, but I’ll never forget the poor able-bodied soul who exited the handicapp...

Airplanes

by Len Kuntz

My daughter is running out of room. Where she’s not pierced, tattoos take birth on all exposed areas—eyelids, and even inside her lower gu...

Airplanes

by Chloe Olewitz

What is to be said about that shrieking baby three rows back? I remember the story of my twenty-second-story Gardenia neighbor in a Manhattan restaura...

Airports

by Jeff Hawthorne

Passing through TSA security checkpoints has become like a Stanley Kubrick film, with partially clothed adults meeting randomly for moody conversation...

Airports

by Giulianna Di Nenna

Life-searching questions arise at night, after sunset, and not just on park benches along river banks. Watching rushing water, reflecting upon it...

Airplanes

by Tasha Cotter

When I read that Thomas Mann likely chose the name Tadzio because it held the word Tod, which means death, I felt satisfied, but then I noticed a gauz...

Airplanes

by Cloé Vaz

In April 2012, I went back to the place I was born: Guinea-Bissau, a small West African country. It was definitely an emotional trip, as I hadn’...

Airplanes

by Maria Cruz

We were on our night flight back home when I noticed that after the fasten seat belt sign went off and the stewardess started to serve drinks, this re...

Airports

by Ilana Nunes

When he and his 10 siblings were born, my heart experienced one of the happiest joys possible. There they were: my furred grandchildren, the perfect c...

Airports

by Cemil Bostan

I booked a flight from Oporto, Portugal, to Weeze, Germany, on Ryanair. Two weeks before my flight I had made a trip to Spain and had bought some gift...

Airplanes

by Eileen Brunetto

Sprawled out in coach, I settled next to my husband as he rooted through his stack of unread New Yorkers. Contemplating the tiny bottles of chardonnay...

Airports

by Tânia Limbert

I clearly remember my first airplane ride. It was in my last year of high school, and instead of taking the the usual mainstream trip to Lloret Del Ma...

Airports

by Bárbara Dabó

I went to the airport for the first time when I was 13 or 14 years old. I was picking up my sister and her new boyfriend who were coming from England....

Airplanes

by Marta da Silva Carvalho

The best stories of our lives are never truly remembered by us; they are told and retold by proud mothers and grandmothers. This particular memory was...

Airplanes

by Mar Scheerer

Use your breath as a guiding force for movement and transformation. Breath. Movement. Transformation. I closed my eyes. I was on the plane, unsure if...

Airports

by Luís Pires

A few years ago I went to London with some friends. Just entering the airport gave me the feeling of entering a whole new universe. There were busy pe...

Airplanes

by Helena Neves

I love travelling but I hate flying, which presents rather a big dilemma every time I’m at an airport waiting for a flight—they’re n...

Airplanes

by João Diogo

Clothes? Check! Crucial hygiene products? Check (except the swabs, I always forget to buy them)! Cell phone and mp3 player? Totally check! Annoying an...

Airports

by Anouk de Jonge

In March 2010, I went on a trip from my home in the Netherlands to Brazil. I travelled around a little bit, visited Rio de Janeiro, Foz do Igua&ccedil...

Airplanes

by Diogo Almeida

A few years ago, I went on one of those terrible affairs known as “family vacations” with, well, my family. At the time this included both...

Airplanes

by Nicoletta-Laura Dobrescu

In 1998, I flew for the first time when I was a second-year university student. Many people may find it rather late for a first flight, but at the tim...

Airports

by Vanessa Cipriano

When I first started to travel by airplane I was just a baby—not even able to walk yet. The flights were always to Belgium where we visited fami...

Airports

by Bárbara Sorger

My mother used to work in a publishing house that had three magazines related to Africa and Brazil. Once a year there used to be a party in one of the...

Airports

by Marta Rocha

I don’t understand airports. Aren’t they supposed to be a place where people just sit down, wait for the plane, and then fly? I mean, nowa...

Airplanes

by Cody Acosta

Every time I step foot onto an airplane, I order a ginger-ale. It has become a sort of ritual of air travel for me; thinking about the peculiar differ...

Airplanes

by Monica Aust

I’ve been flying all my life; in fact, I even flew in utero, when my mother was pregnant with me, when all I’d ever known at that point wa...

Airplanes

by Kobus Moolman

I recently spent two months as a guest of the English Department at the University of Calgary. I was on a sabbatical, completing work on my doctorate....

Airports

by Cara Marino

My aunt needed to get to the airport and my mother happily volunteered her time and that of mine and my younger sister. Our trip should have been unev...

Airports

by Randy Malamud

It’s simulation day at Atlanta’s new Maynard H. Jackson Jr. International Terminal. Fifteen hundred people with nothing better to do have...

Airplanes

by Jordan Tyler

We are making a trip from Dallas to Palm Springs for a national powerlifting meet. In the Phoenix airport, our layover stop, we are about to board. I...

Airplanes

by Kelly Ross

Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to...

Airports

by Asia Stephens-Argraves

First, grab your pairs of pants and shirts. Don’t forget your toothbrush or you’ll have to use you finger for the rest of the trip. Once y...

Airplanes

by Erin Seidemann

I named my Cessna “Orion” for the constellation that was shining majestically above him on the night he became mine. Not too long after Or...

Airplanes

by Tarn Wilson

He sat in the window seat, immersed in a magazine. I registered little about him other than he’d crossed his legs, he wore cuffed business slack...

Airplanes

by Kyle Talbot

My history with air travel has led to an increased loss of hair at a young age. I’ve been late for flights, delayed by flights, and even uninten...

Airports

by May Todd

Since I was a child, my parents have told me that I bloom where I am planted. This first referred to my habits as I learned to walk, but the phrase st...

Airplanes

by Jourdyn McClain

Orville and Wilbur Wright had their first successful experiment with the airplane on December 17, 1903. Today the airplane is not perfect or anywhere...

Airplanes

by Emily Roth

Until my first year away at college, I had not traveled out of the country. I had flown from Washington to Florida and yet never took the relatively s...

Airplanes

by Susan Vander Kooi

The turbulence started suddenly and I gripped the armrests and closed my eyes against my jarring reality. I was coming back home from a ten-week study...

Airports

by Jessie Hodet

Birthdays are always a time for celebration. A couple of years ago my family and I had planned a fabulous cruise down the Mexican Riviera. My husband,...

Airplanes

by Katie Harriman

I was sitting in the aisle seat. My mom, my step-dad, and my then five-year-old half-brother, Sean, were sitting in the row beside me. We were on a fi...

Airplanes

by Lydia Buchanan

I could tell you about the time that my family and I had to make an emergency landing in Colorado, amidst silver-suited firefighters and then had to s...

Airplanes

by Krystal Valle

Alaska Airlines claims the flight from Yakima, Washington, to Seattle is only about 43 minutes. This is a lie. The actual flight takes 17 minutes, but...

Airplanes

by Elaine Bassier

When I was 14 and a half, six years ago, I went on my first plane trip without my parents. Delta has a program that allows children from ages eight to...

Airplanes

by Lauren Hunt

You: Twenty-something bearded fellow, right aisle seat on a Southwest flight to Oakland. Me: College student in the middle seat with the huge book you...

Airports

by Jack Bernard

Gamba Osaka is a Japanese soccer team in the Asian Football League. I'd never heard of Gamba until Tuesday morning. It looks like pretty good team...

Airplanes

by Mitchell Linn Harris

Every ounce on an airplane is accounted for. Every ounce is expensive. Knowing this does not offer any sort of comfort when you realize there are thre...

Airplanes

by Phyllis McKinley

“You go first, Nana, to break a path.” These are my instructions from six-year-old Josh. I plunk onto a sled in the sub-zero Canadian air...

Airports

by Simone Ashby

It was 1996 and I was at the end of a two-week holiday in Malaysia from my teaching job in Korea. My employer had asked with no trace of humor that I...

Airports

by Julian Hanna

Future wife and I were waiting at SFO to catch a post-Christmas flight back to Edinburgh, Scotland, where we lived at the time. It was the second leg...

Airlines

by Jeffrey McDaniel

I must admit something happened to my spirit during check-in: a dampening, but also a lit match dragged around the fringes. So this is what it feels l...

Airplanes

by Valery V. Petrovskiy

The TU-134 aircraft was quite suitable, if not for all the passengers who packed it like a communal flat. Without passengers, the cabin would have loo...

Airplanes

by Nina Katchadourian

                 While in the lavatory on a domestic flight in March 2...

Airplanes

by Cory Emerson

I sit in seat 22F, the plane idling on the Tampa runway, my brain idling in my skull. I am assigned 22E, the dreaded middle seat, but a heavyset, elde...

Airplanes

by Mark J Brewin Jr

—for Kevin Malone When I was a kid I’d fall asleep in any moving vehicle at the drop of a hat. There was this one time when I was in my pa...

Airplanes

by Joe Bardin

While living in Tel Aviv, I received a call from a girl I’d had a weekend romance with in New York City after college. She invited me to meet he...

Airports

by Roselle O'Brien

The sun was rising this morning when I pulled out of the parking lot. I stopped, shut off the headlights. They were the wrong illumination for the daw...

Airplanes

by Phillip Barron

"Thrust and lift," says the sexual sounding diorama diagramming how planes keep up in the air in the metropolitan museum of science and indu...

Airplanes

by Jane Blakeley

On a connecting flight from Tallahassee home to Kansas City, I fell in love. Or, rather, I was coming from one love and rebounding into the thin, synt...

Airplanes

by Jessi Probus

Communities can be drawn, created, discovered, inferred. But communities can also be overlooked. There is a community of people who are all in airplan...

Airplanes

by Sharon Kurtzman

For the last 16 years, my husband has spent about a third of each year traveling for business. The kids and I miss him when he’s gone and t...

Airports

by Laurie Stone

The girl’s navel winks below her halter top, and her dimpled ass swells above her terry shorts. Her perfection forecasts its falling off and is...

Airports

by Anna Leahy & Douglas Dechow

For several years, we lived in Galesburg, Illinois, a town with a small airport, a place we’d swing by, trying to catch sight of a takeoff or la...

Airplanes

by Rita de Costa

Even if I didn't have my nacrolepsy under control by that point, I thought I knew what I was doing—I thought I could manage the flight and t...

Airports

by Candace Mobley

Two weeks earlier I was at this same place with our three children. We each held red, white, and blue balloons tied to dying sunfl...

Airplanes

by Tim Lantz

During the second sunrise of November 1, 2010, it occurred to me: Last night I was in a haunted house on the other side of the world. It was the secon...

Airplanes

by Jack Bernard

Take a good look at this picture. Wide-body aircraft cabin, spacious seating, smiling flight attendants and so on. Remember this picture the next time...

Airports

by Michael Cornelius

I was in my last year of graduate school, and I was flying home for the holidays. It was Christmas Eve, and I’d just managed to finish my last a...

Airplanes

by Matthew Butts

I've travelled to China, Japan, and Hong Kong, but human existance remains a mystery hidden inside a complex and unbalanced duality called "b...

Airports

by Christopher Shipman

My wife gets gassy and wonders if I still love her in this airport where she squints her face to shape how the air may smell for a few seconds, becaus...

Airplanes

by Suzy Eynon

I treat the date of travel printed on my flight itinerary as an expiration date. I always manage to board the plane, but the fear stews, seeping out i...

Airports

by Jeanette Lukowski

On Friday, April 24, 2009, my 15-year-old daughter ran away from home. The next day she was discovered in Chicago, approximately 650 miles from o...

Airports

by Jack Bernard

I think of myself as a short-term pessimist and long-term optimist. I try to take the long view and think positively about people and the world. Latel...

Airports

by Andy Shaindlin

My foreign study experience as a college student was in 1985. I spent six months in Brussels, arriving in January. Brussels in January—and Febru...

Airplanes

by Chris Glover

You start out thinking it's a child-like feeling. You look out the window and wonder whether this is your first flight or your tenth. Maybe it&#39...

Airports

by Cristina Garrigós

On September 11, 2001, we were flying on Lufthansa from Madrid to Washington via Frankfurt. The flight from Madrid to Frankfurt had been perfect. But...

Airplanes

by Roger Sedarat

After 17 years of marriage, I had a little affair with my wife. Because it happened on an airplane, to this day I find flying especially erotic. On th...

Airplanes

by Hugo Reinert

For hours, it seemed, I stood out there on the runway with the other passengers—watching the fire crews, wondering if I might still make it home...

Airplanes

by Scott Saalman

My great-great uncle, Joe Reed, was a wing walker in the 1920s. He also did loop-the-loops, barrel rolls and hung from planes' axles. Uncle Joe wa...

Airports

by Sara Elle

My name is Sara and I’m an alcoholic; I did some of my best drinking on airplanes.  By the time I was eighteen, I had a fake ID, a rich boy...

Airports

by Bobby Fox

After a trip that embodied Ukraine’s unofficial motto (“Ukraine is not for the meek”), it came as no surprise that departing from th...

Airports

by Bobby Fox

When I finally disembarked off the third plane on my journey to Ukraine, I was greeted by a foreboding, single, small, grey, Soviet-era terminal. Insi...

Airplanes

by Pearu Unga

I hate flying. My two-hour and ten-minute flight to Prague seemed to last for at least half a day. But then I had been awake all night and your brain...

Airlines

by Stewart Sinclair

The commercial pilot has pretty well completed the transition from hero to robot that Roland Barthes explored in 1955 in his essay “The Jet-Man....

Airplanes

by Bobby Fox

When I arrived at the gate for connecting flight from Germany to Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, it was clear I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. The crowded w...

Airplanes

by Donald Dunbar

Though my flight was at eight in the morning, I decided (?) it would be an excellent idea to stay up until six-ish smoking bowl after bowl with Vaness...

Airports

by Jess Stoner

It was 2000, and I had arrived at Reagan National Airport with enough time to have a beer before my flight. It was only a few months after the Music C...

Airplanes

by David A. Fitschen

2/28/98     Quantas Airways Seat 51H I could have started a few days before this, but I saw no point. The flight is now. Which mak...

Airports

by Matthew Dexter

I walked through the Newark International Airport metal detector with an ounce of marijuana in my jockstrap and two pellets of mescaline in my sock. I...

Airplanes

by B. Frayn Masters

On a plane back home from Portland, OR, to Burbank, CA, I flopped into my spacious window seat. A few months earlier, through a humor-driven letter pl...

Airplanes

by Marisa Mangani

Twenty minutes into the flight and the plane’s ceiling tore open. Misty air fogged into the cabin. It had been a three-hour wait in the Miami ai...

Airplanes

by Rebecca Renee Hess

I am overweight. Since childhood, size has defined me. Teased, tormented and taunted as a kid because of my butt and belly, adulthood and obesity pres...

Airports

by Fargo Kantrowitz

I remember the snow. I wasn't brought up on snow back in the deserts of Las Vegas, but in Boston they had a lot of it. I remember it sitting in th...

Airports

by Amanda Pleva

"Now boarding all rows for Flight 920, with service to Tokyo Narita." I stared longingly at the neighboring gate as I waited with my crew fo...

Airports

by Chelsey Johnson

I have always led parallel lives, as if one were not enough. Some people do this by having affairs, or playing Second Life or World of Warcraft, or li...

Airplanes

by Alex Pruteanu

I flew to Washington DC from Fort Lauderdale one week after 9/11. The country was still gripped by fear or perceived fear or government-manufactured f...

Airports

by Jonathan Small

*DING* “Uh, well folks, looks like our trusty little, uh, navigator here, well, she seems to be pointing us in, uh, the wrong way here, so, we&r...

Airplanes

by Dustin Michael

I. There’s a minor interrogation going on in the front of the plane. The old guy in 1C is laying it on the flight attendant, a tall redhead in h...

Airplanes

by L. Marie Cook

My bags were safely in the overhead compartment. I had managed to pack reasonable clothing in between paralyzing fits of sadness that left my brain co...

Airplanes

by Vance Osterhout

A wizard is a person who knows so much more about a subject than you that their knowledge of how to manipulate reality escapes your understanding comp...

Airports

by James Schaberg

As we roll toward the runway in preparation for takeoff, I catch sight of two red foxes. The pair is skirting the taxiway in the tall brush, probably...

Airports

by Kimberly Schubert

It's a strange feeling to be stuck between two fat people, two relatively thin walls, and certain death. Using my arm rests is out of the que...

Airports

by Brenda Tobias

Are there any airplane experiences left that do not bear a strong resemblance to an emergency shelter? This is not a rhetorical question. When th...

Airports

by Jeffrey Morgan

My father has a hot pink suitcase. When I don’t fly with him, I think about it. I think about it during descent. Maybe it’s the cabin pres...

Airplanes

by Katie Pugh

There’s no holiday spirit in airports. It’s Christmas, and I am flying from Pittsburgh to southern Virginia to visit my family. Everybody...

Airplanes

by Alethea Kehas

Each summer when I was a child, my sister and I would fly 3,000 miles across the country to visit a place my mother was trying to forget. We drove fro...

Airports

by Mara Huber

I wish I could recall when the utter absurdity of that initial trip revealed itself. I was dropped off at the airport by taxi, not wanting to disturb...

Airplanes

by Kelly Bergin

The first hour is anxiety. The pot she smoked in short-term parking is wearing off and the panic becomes physical when she realizes that her medicine...

Airplanes

by Jennifer Cresap

Once upon a time, I wore coordinating pant suits with crisp white shirts and sensible low-heeled shoes and flew all over the country meeting with clie...

Airplanes

by Vincent Eaton

“Over there is your airplane, sir.” The Munich airport employee had checked my one-way ticket to Rome, then gestured to the bright tarmac...

Airplanes

by Roxane Gay

When I was a child, the people who smoked at the back of the airplane were so sophisticated. They sat in the last four or five or six rows, lounging i...

Airports

by Marisa Mangani

It’s August and I’ll be fifty in nine days. We’re at the Tampa Airport, checked in and sitting at the bar for a breakfast rum drink...

Airports

by Carla Sarett

My father had not flown for a decade or so—perhaps even longer, certainly long enough so that he had no concept of the nightmarish array of secu...

Airports

by Pam Houston

It is 8:00 AM on a Sunday morning in September, and I am down in the East Jesus section of the Denver International Airport where all the smallest Uni...

Airports

by Tasha Cotter

In the dream the man is seen in the terminal with a woman. They are underground, facing each other, and the lights flashing overhead go in stages of b...

Airports

by Allie Marini Batts

Flight: it’s such an equalizer. Whether it's LAX or LaGuardia, Hartsfield-Jackson or Sea-Tac: we're all the same when we're waiting,...

Airports

by Lillian Swanson-Day

I’m relieved when the guy takes his briefcase off of the seat beside him and looks at me. It’s pretty much the only seat left at my gate,...

Airplanes

by Stacy Thowe

The day had finally come. It was my dream trip. After scraping by, cutting back, and eating at home, I still didn’t have enough money for the tr...

Airplanes

by Mike Coe

“It is not really necessary to look too far into the future; we see enough already to be certain it will be magnificent. Only let us hurry and o...

Airplanes

by Nicole Sheets

I swigged cough syrup as discreetly as I could, in a way that I hoped seemed all business rather than recreational. I stowed a roll of square Halls lo...

Airplanes

by Dolores Banerd

Here’s what you need to remember when you return from any trip: No one wants to hear your travel stories. No one. Not your doting parents who us...

Airplanes

by Catherine Newstead

After spending 25 days traveling with my son Blair, his girlfriend Helen, their friends Dave, Reena and Neil, I was flying home, leaving them to conti...

Airports

by Tim Morton

Air travel brings up a lot of strong emotions, most of them negative: boredom, scorn, pride, paranoia, anger, loneliness, stupor, smugness, anxiety, s...

Airports

by Jacqueline Jules

Dragging my portable closet on wheels I follow a line of tense travelers whining over boarding delays and tight overhead bins until reaching my slende...

Airplanes

by Justin Marks

I was on a flight home from Austin, Texas, to New York City in 2005. We were 30 minutes out from JFK when the pilot came on and said we had to make an...

Airports

by Alex Pruteanu

I took Hemingway and Bukowski and Palahniuk and F. Scott and Hitchens with me, and we crossed the border into Canada like the hooligans that we are (F...

Airplanes

by Kevin Bray

In any airport that makes it possible, I like to see the plane on which I will soar. Most terminals I have been in afford fantastic views of the tarma...

Airports

by Elise Gottschalk

Mom tells me that as a toddler I'd look up at a plane in the sky and point and say "Daddy! Daddy!" I don't remember doing this, but...

Airports

by Christopher Schaberg

It was warm coming down the concourse even in the late evening. The moon lit up the taxiway around the blinking lights and illuminated the planes. It...

Death

by Pam Howard-Jones

I’ve held this birthday card in my hands many times before. We are in early March and the card is ready to embark on its outbound journey to New...

Trips

by Marcus Speh

Suddenly I remember my trip through the U.S. in 1980: no cells; the locked dials of the Bakelite phone next to the motel bed. 70s colors everywhere, t...

Airplanes

by Bryan Batt

Over the past several years, I have become quite the frequent flyer, more so than I ever would have thought given the history of my fear of flying. La...

Airports

by Sandra Gail Teichmann-Hillesheim

This new beaver stroller suits me, and I'm going to Chicago. Uncut guard hairs, and I know, too warm for the latitude where we live. The sales cle...

Airplanes

by Ian Ferguson

I had a great job that involved visiting our offices in Asia on a frequent basis so I became very familiar with the Trans-Pacific Business and occasio...

Airplanes

by Wayne Scheer

Alex found flying boring, but when he squeezed past the attractive woman in the aisle seat to get to his, he thought this flight might not be so bad a...

Airports

by Robby McChargue

Sunday, December 18, 2011 Returning home from Colorado Springs after a week visiting my parents, I find myself, as do all Delta customers, regardless...

Airplanes

by Chella Courington

I take another half an Ativan, finishing my second cranberry and vodka with soda. The steward comes to the back row (it is a Monday), takes my glass a...

Airports

by David Myers

I am distinterested in airplanes. I have some interest in this. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant claims disinterest is necessary to aesthetics. Maybe...

Airplanes

by Barry Basden

She flees on the first available flight. Still, her suite overlooks Waikiki. For days she stares out to sea and hikes the beach toward Diamond Head. I...

Airports

by Koty Neelis

Traveling makes me feel really sexy. I love the way people dress—in business suits and sundresses, in hoodies and pencil skirts. Some are travel...

Airplanes

by Dolores Banerd

On my first 14-hour flight to Bangkok from Los Angeles I became aware that I’m not at the top of the food chain. This is a place reserved exclus...

Airplanes

by Sadie Palomino

I don’t want to tell you that I am a hooker. That story’s old news. I don’t want to tell you that in my luggage, I’ve packed t...

Airports

by Christopher Allen

I wouldn't say I like surprises when I travel; I simply don't enjoy planning. I've left that part of the trip to my partner and traveling...

Airplanes

by Len Kuntz

Seated next to him, the girl keeps herself busy drawing pictures of dismembered pets—dogs, cats, rodents with collars. He pretends not to notice...

Airports

by Meagan Simmons

I am on a plane en route to the Virgin Islands with my mother, and my father’s body is undergoing an autopsy, and my senior year is starting wit...

Airplanes

by Alex Pruteanu

"I'm not religious," she says. "You know me...live and let live...whatever you believe is okay with  me." Her favourite c...

Airplanes

by Kim Chinquee

On the plane to Mexico, the woman next to me said she was going to find Jesus. She bounced her boy, a toddler, and said Maine weather made her evil. S...

Airports

by Sabrina Nyka

2:59 a.m. and I am wide awake, one minute before the alarm clock goes off. I think to myself: it’s not right to be awake at this time for any re...

Airplanes

by Weldon Ryckman

I let myself drift into sleep, almost. I lean my head back and allow myself to fall in rhythm with the humming undercurrent of the drone of the engine...

Airports

by Chelsey Watley

I open the door, say goodbye to my family, step out of the car, and walk into DFW International Airport. I am going to be gone for one month, for stud...

Airports

by Josh Highlander

Being a military child usually means lots of travel, from base to base and from assignment to assignment. For me, it meant constantly losing friends,...

Airplanes

by Claudia Smithart

When I was a little girl, my dad frequently used to travel for work. He would go to places like New York and Las Vegas. I made him promise that one da...

Airplanes

by Taylor Phelps

As a fifth grade boy only months away from the start of middle school, I did my best to mask fear from others hoping to appear as the man I so despera...

Airplanes

by Jacob Rodell

We have our special first times which might include our first day of school, first kiss, first time driving, and the infamous first haircut. One of th...

Airplanes

by Payton Moreland

Years ago, when I was an eighth grade student in middle school, I was given the opportunity to be a part of a trip that would go to Spain. After raisi...

Airplanes

by Jack Saux

This story dates back to the 1970’s, so all statutes of limitations have expired and airline procedures have changed. In the pre-9/11 era, occas...

Airplanes

by Jody Hedstrom

“Ma’am!”   The flight attendant barks at me like I’m a stray dog begging for a scrap of food. I let the curtain close beh...

Airplanes

by Jami Nakamura Lin

We squeeze into our seats, my sister Cori and I. I get there first, so I steal the aisle seat, crushing my pink backpack underneath the seat in front...

Airplanes

by John Sierpinski

My girlfriend, Jill, and I are strapped into this plane over Diamond Bar. It’s after our vacation, and we’re heading home to Milwaukee. I&...

Airplanes

by Elynne Chaplik-Aleskow

A few years after the commercial plane crash that killed my grandmother, my university creative writing Professor told me in his critique that I had t...

Airports

by Lindsey Silken

When I decided to fly to Memphis for a second date, my friends were suspiciously supportive. I guess they figured that between playing writer by night...

Airplanes

by Konrad Eisen

I’m in the window seat typing...when out of the corner of my eye out the window I see what looks to be a rocket. It’s a plane, of course....

Airplanes

by Ehud Sela

At thirty thousand feet above the plane began to shake. “Turbulence,” explained the captain over the PA system. “Fasten your seat be...

Airplanes

by Susan Hodara

For the last four hours of our flight from Nice to New York, the man’s body lay across the middle seats of the row behind us. The flight attenda...

Airplanes

by Arthur Plotnik

I was 42 when the American Airlines aircraft I'd boarded in Chicago was set to explode in midair. Beneath me, in the baggage hold, was a live bomb...

Airplanes

by Kate Dernocoeur

The first thing is the light, opaque like glacial runoff. At first, I don’t even recognize this murky peculiarity as light, but I can see that i...

Airplanes

by Louis Gallo

...at some point in my twenties: Bloody Marys, "Rhapsody in Blue," oxygen masks, Delta does what it can to erase the memory of the one that...

Airplanes

by Marguerite Kenner

As we roll along on the granite floors of the concourse on our way to Gate 44, I feel a bit hypocritical about the handsome matching luggage my husban...

Airplanes

by Rose Cook

And so as we take off the cheerful man in the seat next to me, with his giant RAF watch with gold wings for hands and his crowned winged badge in his...

Airplanes

by Carol Tracy Carr

Fresh out of law school, I was happy to find a job, even though the hours were long, my boss was eccentric, the salary was pitiful, and he offered onl...

Airplanes

by Christopher Schaberg

It was 2002 and I was in the window seat next to a man who had the aisle seat. This was on a Canadair Regional Jet, which has two seats on each side o...

Pilots

by Pete Olson

We just sat there for a few seconds, peering into the snow and ice crystals dancing straight at us into the windshield, front-lit by the landing light...

Airports

by Stephen Rea

I admit it’s ironic. I’m trapped in an airport, the place you go to escape. I’ve been stuck in DFW for eleven hours. Best case scena...

Airlines

by Ander Monson

United Airlines flight 5437, Tucson to Denver, 5:15 a.m. Seat 10D backseat library Not for lending, these volumes, SkyWest magazine, with a feature on...

Airplanes

by Denis Robillard

I’m thinking to myself, what am I getting myself into here, folks? When was the last time I really got onto a plane? Surely it’s been over...

Airports

by Geoff Watkinson

Although I’m surrounded by thousands of people at the Atlanta airport during a layover, it’s a lonely Fourth of July. I call Natalie, a gi...

Airlines

by Mike Duggan

Ryanair: Oh where to do I begin, Mr. O'Leary? Your airline appears to be a joke at every passenger’s expense. You're not kidding anyone....

Airplanes

by John Goossens

The West Jet plane that had departed Toronto Pearson Airport five hours prior started its descent toward the Vancouver skyline and the snaking Fraser...

Airports

by Mallory

I am three days from getting on an airplane. After many months away from my husband and my family, I am finally going home. This is both very exciting...

Airports

by Gerry Holzman

I did, but I don’t anymore.    On a non-stop US Airways flight from JFK to Phoenix, one of my suitcases went missing. Although I&...

Airplanes

by Sandra Vallie

I could fall the distance between the plane and the ground in a bit more than two minutes. I have no wish to do this, but it’s good to know I ca...

Airplanes

by Edward Pinnegar

The sun struggled through the patchy grey sky to glint off the yellow tail fin, on which the logo of a puffin in flight seemed strangely motionless. A...

Airports

by Linda Coburn

My usual modus operandi while waiting for a plane is to find a seat far from the gate and any aisles, away from the eager beavers who jump up the minu...

Airplanes

by Birdie Jaworski

I made a trip to the Midwest, and flew home from St. Louis in a plane chock full of vacation people. I sat next to a window over the wing, and watched...

Airplanes

by Robert Landon

It is only on overnight flights that I allow myself the luxury of a sleeping pill. Not that I am afraid of flying itself. I rather like it, in fact. H...

Airports

by Emily Farranto

I used to pass time at the airport. This was before heightened security when you could go unticketed, luggageless and sit in the airport bar or by the...

Airplanes

by Claude Clayton Smith

At the far end of the hall lived a guy whose name I no longer remember, perhaps because I’m repressing it. I’ll call him Moe. Moe was suic...

Airports

by Bart Plantenga

I always try my best to blend in when I’m flying because I’ve always been an easy mark for customs and immigration officials with authorit...

Airports

by Nicole Heaton

I had a lot of apprehension about flying with my infant daughter for the first time. I had boarded many planes in my life, but never with a baby in to...

Airports

by Catherine Miller

Miranda July wrote in a recent New Yorker that she used to steal her friends’ luggage and then get her friends to put in a false claim for the insur...

Airports

by SuzAnne Cole

August 16, 2003 Rod Eddington, Chief Executive British Airways Waterside (HCB3) PO Box 365 Harmondsworth UB7 0GB Dear Mr. Eddington: On August 11, 200...

Security

by Ramona Scarborough

I was on a diet...again. So when I got on the airplane in Portland to fly to Sacramento, I brought a salad.  When I reached the security checkpoi...

Airplanes

by Anna Vodicka

I once read an in-flight magazine article about businesspeople using airplanes as a vehicle for sales. They’d realized commercial flights were a...

Airplanes

by Jim Gustafson

So I am flying from Reno to Minneapolis, in the window seat. On my left the man in the middle speaks to the woman knitting In the aisle seat, her nimb...

Airplanes

by Vanessa Junkin

February 28: Pearson International The mellow blue sky slowly grabbed up at the plane, cradled us in its fist. It was early morning and already dissoc...

Airplanes

by J. Ryan Williams

On my last trip to Dallas I was seated next to a business traveler who used Virgin Air's onboard wifi to watch YouTube videos of plane crashes thr...

Airplanes

by William Stobb

As they do to many slightly cautious or even wholly reasonable people, commercial jets seemed unlikely to me—the weight, the velocity, the shape...

Airports

by Michael M. Pacheco

Flying from Portland to Las Vegas is a fairly common trip for me and my wife, maybe too common. Earlier this year, we were passing through the metal d...

Airports

by Kristi DeMeester

It was only my second flight, and I hadn’t yet mastered the grace that inevitably comes to the seasoned traveler. The subtle removal of shoes, t...

Airplanes

by Danielle Susi

May 2010 As our plane ascended, the New York City skyline was a silhouette of pillars, backlit by the rising sun. The sky, a hazy blue-green frosted w...

Death

by Michael Booth

If the scythe of heaven were to suddenly swing like a pendulum from a point, sing through the atmosphere—unthinking, unblinking—and divide...

Airplanes

by Bobby Smithe

I was twenty-nine, already middle-aged in my mind, and had made my decision. By the time I bought the plane ticket I knew there was no turning back; I...

Airports

by Bhob Rainey

Leeds had gone well. Pints of improbably fresh Tetley Ale lent some effervescence to the concert, and the hospitality of the show's organizers was...

Security

by Beth McKim

In those days it was as if each of us had been given a daunting assignment: observing and reporting all suspicious people and their activities. This w...

Airlines

by Stewart Sinclair

NoLimits A sleek, glossy pamphlet reads:                   NoLimi...

by Kate Dorhout

I’d been on some long flights before, but the flight from Johannesburg to JFK was the worst flight of my entire life. I had been looking forward...

Airplanes

by Andrei Codrescu

On airplanes you should read Hungarian novels—they are the only reading that flies at the same altitude. I just let Skylark by Deszo Kosztolanyi...

Airplanes

by Ian Bogost

I will fly more than 200,000 miles this year. It routinizes, like an extended commute. The suburbanite knows every moment of the drive: on-ramp, lane-...

Airplanes

by Bonnie Price

Looking back, it's bizarre how some of the most mundane afternoons have the potential to be transformed into storytelling magic. That happened to...

Airplanes

by Kristin Sanders

When I was nineteen and in between my first and second years of college, I took my first and last trip to Las Vegas. I flew with my mom, dad, and sist...

Airplanes

by Megan Volpert

For several years now, I have seen the sunrise every weekday. My primary instinct is to splash in it like a puddle, to go up into the abstract and two...

Airplanes

by Dawn Corrigan

Like messages from an entrepreneurial God, banners unfurled across our sky each summer day at the Jersey shore, proclaiming unportentous facts like BL...

Security

by Connie Porter

Reading The New York Times this past August, I was drawn to the headline, “With Hair Pat Downs, Complaints Of Racial Bias.” Two African-Am...

Airplanes

by Anastasia Nicole Simon

I was raised Catholic so I carry several coin sized medals in my wallet depicting saints, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ, more like a superstitious...

Airplanes

by Roz Warren

I always request a seat assignment when I make a plane reservation. If you wait till you get to the airport, you’re liable to wind up squeezed i...

Airports

by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

You book your own flights. You don’t have a fancy assistant who does these sorts of things. You are scheduled to read your poetry at a conferenc...

Airplanes

by Gabriel Tolliver

An obscure Rolling Stones song started to play in my mental iPod—every soldier has their theme music! We moved in a lazy, single-file way down t...

Airplanes

by Josh Lefkowitz

  Memorial Day weekend. I'm on my way to North Carolina   to visit my bro and his wife and their two kids, my three-year-old niece &nbsp...

Airplanes

by Thomas Gibbs, MD

I was flying back from my mother-in-law’s funeral. My wife had stayed behind. Finishing a Heineken and ready to order another, I noticed the man...

Airports

by Christopher Citro

Here I am in an airport again, waiting for a delayed plane to take me back home to Kansas from my trip to Ohio for the holidays, a stale Caesar salad...

Airports

by Ramona Scarborough

I almost missed my connecting flight to Omaha due to a delay at the Portland airport. Quickly seating myself, I noticed a large, swarthy turbaned man...

Airplanes

by Michelle Auerbach

  All the planes have been used on someone else. All the overhead bins are full. All the seats have been taken. All the coy mistresses, the fleas...

Airplanes

by Hal Sirowitz

I was on a flight from New York to Pittsburgh. All of a sudden the pilot got on the loudspeaker telling us that we’re going to make an emergency...

by Brenda Bellinger

Seat belts buckled, tray tables raised, we nosed down into gray and white cotton candy. In sunlight and shadow, forty shades of green rose to greet us...

Airports

by Allyson Goldin Loomis

Before I get on an airplane, I prepare to die. My terror cannot be assuaged by anyone’s quoting safety statistics, the laws of physics, or the t...

Airplanes

by Michael M. Pacheco

After boarding in Portland I settled in for a relatively short flight to Phoenix. For a while I thought no one was going to occupy the seat to my righ...

Airports

by Michael Howarth

It’s only during the past ten years that I’ve developed an intense fear of flying. I do realize that my chances of dying in a plane crash...

Airports

by Steve Newton

I had just flown from NYC to Denver and there was a layover of a couple of hours before I was to catch a flight for Salt Lake City. This was a time th...

Airplanes

by Susan Perl

There was this one time I flew from Detroit to Miami and back to Detroit in one day. I won't say what I was doing. It wasn't exactly illicit,...

Airports

by Meredith Pond

About 45 minutes into our flight from Dallas to Cabo San Lucas, we hear the captain say, “Nothing to worry about folks, but we're making a l...

Airplanes

by Lauren Frederick

I haven't been on many flights in my life. My preferred method of travel is by boat, then by car, then by bike, then by hot air balloon, horseback...

by Cynthia Bargar

Sleeping bagels tucked into brown paper beds and free Boston Globes and Wall Street Journals greeted us. I chose Globe with its smoky volcanic Iceland...

Airports

by Tony D'Souza

My mother worked reservations at United Airlines in Chicago before all those jobs were sent to India, and not having any clue how fortunate I was, I g...

Airplanes

by Cat Pleska

It happens many times a year: flights more resembling a roller coaster than a smooth glide at 30,000 feet. But while many like roller coasters, scream...

Airports

by Harold Jaffe

Vodka A man swallowed a liter of top-shelf brand vodka rather than surrender it to airport personnel (who themselves would drink it after hours). New...

Airports

by Simeon Hunter

Airports are a special kind of space. Architecturally they may be, like churches and fire stations, iconoclastic, singular, without reference to their...

Airplanes

by Kerry Cullen

I shove and shuffle inside the hulk of metal. I’m a cross-country college student, so these moments are familiar to me and I’m aware of th...

Airplanes

by Joseph Kavanaugh

I fly a lot for business—sales. I fly so much it feels like commuting. The flight attendants all know me by first name. They know my wife’...

Airports

by Diego Báez

Miami International is such a piece of shit. It’s like nothing ever ends: terminals devour runways, runways birth terminals, everything always u...

Airplanes

by Maria Pinheiro

There are, in my opinion, two types of people in this world: those who enjoy flying in planes, and those who would rather embark on a long and arduous...

Airplanes

by Marit MacArthur

As if the view out the window were not abstract enough, lakes as pocket mirrors, mountains as sugar-dusted alligator spines, tiny towns as constellati...

Airports

by Robert Ben Garant

One of the scariest things I've seen since 9/11 actually happened on the ground. At the airport in Cleveland. Waiting between flights, I wandered...

Airplanes

by Jon Bonkoski

Having been lulled to sleep by the droning whir of the turbo prop, I awoke to the yammering of the woman sitting behind me. I realized she had been ta...

Airports

by Jennifer Kowalski

Okay, it wasn’t really a play date; it was just my son and me. And it wasn’t weird, like that time a few years ago when one of my friends...

Airports

by Matthew Guenette

This happened at Logan Airport, at the check-in.  My younger brother was standing behind me.  The woman at the counter asked if I had been,...

Airplanes

by Patricia Colleen Murphy

If you want to know for certain your father loves you, take his large wingspan hand into your delicate one. Remember how he pointed to each word as he...

Airports

by Andrew Maxwell

It is hard not to ponder the prominent ‘spoils of war’ displays that are arranged in shadowboxes at major security checkpoints. First I wo...

Airports

by Greg Keeler

Delta had just absorbed Northwest and I didn't know which gate to check in at when I was returning home from D.C. a couple of summers ago, so I we...

Airports

by J. Ryan Williams

today at the airport: -> 7 days no sex makes one weak ughhhhh ready for my hubby to touchdown he mite get it in the car at the airport im so n...

Airplanes

by Jim Courtad

It was a flight from Detroit to Austin with a stop at Houston Intercontinental Airport. My wife had a conference in Austin (where we lived for 6 years...