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...

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...

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 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...

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,...

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...

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 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 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 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 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 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...

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 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 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...

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...

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...

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 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 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 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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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 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 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 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 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 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...

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 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 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...

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 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...

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 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...

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...

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 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 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...

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 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 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 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...

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 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 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...

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...

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 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 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...