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...

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...

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 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 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...

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 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 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 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 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 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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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 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 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,...

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...

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...

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 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...

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 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 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...

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...

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...

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 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 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...

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 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 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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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 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 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 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 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...

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 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 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 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 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 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...

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 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 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 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 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...

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...

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 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 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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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 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 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 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 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&...

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 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 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 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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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 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 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...

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...

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,...

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...