NOVEMBER 23, 2021 – Yesterday my wife and I were among the millions of Thanksgiving week air-travelers. From MSP to BDL, we experienced no bumps, not even over the Great Lakes. After a smooth flight, the three-point landing couldn’t have been executed more cleanly. “Nice landing,” I said to the captain as we exited the aircraft. Complimenting pilots was what always I’d done as a more frequent flyer.
Old routines return easily, I discovered, once they’re ingrained in our brains. I couldn’t believe I’d been grounded for over 26 months.
Of course, things had changed since September 2019. Everyone—nearly everyone—wore a mask. Two years into the pandemic, wearing a mask on the chin or under the nose, is still not wearing a mask. I wanted to approach such non-mask wearers and ask if they also kept their hands warm by holding their gloves in their palms. But I didn’t. One routine I’d never learned was confronting total strangers at an airport. From what I’ve read, pitched “mask” battles have occurred aboard flights. We experienced the opposite. Aboard the plane and inside both airports we encountered consistent civility and courtesy among fellow passengers, TSA workers and airline personnel.
From my (familiar) window seat, I marveled at the earth far below—to the extent it could be seen through broken clouds. How wonderful, I thought, to be floating again over the surface of a planet, this planet, our planet.
After we’d pulled up to the gate in Hartford, I marveled at how our species has managed to survive without eyes on the back of the head to alert us to people like I, who’d like to hit oblivious people over the head with their unwieldy “carry on.” People in forward rows seemed to ignore us in steerage, waiting interminably for the upper class to remove their over-sized luggage from the overhead bins, then squeeze and stumble down an aisle designed for people of pencil-sized girth and no “carry on.” If the plane landed ahead of schedule, our release thereafter seemed to take forever. “Yes, but the flight was trouble-free,” I told myself, “which makes you one cranky curmudgeon if you complain one second longer.” I calmed down in the face of this reminder that “carry on” removal was part of the old routine.
Baggage reclamation went without a hitch but not without a touch of humor on the part of an announcer, reminding people to double-check their luggage. “Folks,” he said, “you don’t want to get home and realize you have someone else’s baggage.” If we’d flown from the land of one great American humorist, we’d landed near the home of another one—Samuel Clemens, a/k/a “markin’ on the twine,” a/k/a “Mark Twain.”
Outside, during our short wait for our son, jack-hammers started up. How reassuring, I thought, to hear the old familiar sound of airport construction. The assault reminded me that through thick and thin, wind and weather, politics and pandemic, the enormously complex enterprise of commercial aviation can still deliver.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
