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...

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 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 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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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 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 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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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....

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 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 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...

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 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 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 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...

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...

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 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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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 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 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...

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...

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 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&...

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 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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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 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...

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...

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 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 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 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...

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...

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...

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’...

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...

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...

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...