Flying Blind

Whenever I board an airliner through the jetway, I practice a well-grooved ritual that I believe keeps the plane in the air. I won't spell it all out for fear of compromising its spiritual integrity, suffice to say it involves touching the airliner with my hand, looking at the runway, talking to God, and stepping into the aircraft with faithful choreography.

My first flight in an airliner came in 1959 during our familiar transmigration of body and soul from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. We flew out of LaGuardia on a three-tailed, glamorous Lockheed Constellation, lit up by spotlights on the damp runway with its bright red "TWA" insignia behind a veil of showers. In those days, you had your own compartment and the stewardess handed you a blanket, pillow, and comfortable slippers.

You could see the fiery exhaust streaming from behind the propellers in the dark gloom and tendrils of lightning burst from the pillars of black clouds. I thought the engines had caught fire, and I slept fitfully. In the morning, the painted desert stretched out below in pink and amber light. Over Las Vegas they served eggs and bacon and toast, and after the Constellation dropped hundreds of feet in a sudden air pocket, I threw it all up in the tray.

The details may be apocryphal, but I haven't been comfortable in an airline since. Those falling oxygen masks during my flight to Athens were doozies.

Leaping Off
In an attempt to cure my fear of falling, crashing, & dying, I signed up for a full course of hang-gliding lessons in the 1970s. We drove out to Sand City near Monterey before sunrise and met on the tall dunes in the face of an offshore breeze. These were first-generation Regallo kites with delta shapes, heavy, ungainly, hard to steer, and we strapped ourselves into them, ran headlong down the dune, then lifted the leading edge into the breeze and were swept into the air. It felt as if a powerful hawk had seized your spine and dragged you into the sky. After flying forty or fifty yards, you lowered the edge and crashed into the sand.

I stayed with it much longer than I had intended, although I never gained the expertise or willingness to leap off of a cliff. And when my instructor failed to tie himself into the harness one day and fell a thousand feet from the kite during a steep dive off of the Santa Cruz mountains, I canceled the balance of my lessons.

Acting the Imbecile
In my senior year of college, The Boys took flying lessons. Dennis, Russ and Kevin signed up together. The year before they had all gotten motorcycles. I would visit them on my trips to Los Angeles from northern California during semester breaks to view the toy de jour. I was as excited about going up in a small airplane with them as one might yearn to be covered with hot tar. I hated small planes. They bounced around in the clutches of the wind. They had fixed windows that made the cramped quarters even more catastrophic when airborne. And they fell out of the sky all the time.

But fearing judgment, I crawled into the rear seat of a low-wing Grumman Tiger and Russ powered the plane down the runway as fast as the little propeller could spin. Just beyond the control tower, I expected the nose to rise gently, for Russ to throttle back and climb. Instead, he raced headlong toward the end of the tarmac where I could see the ratty weeds poking up as they grew near. At the last minute, Russ yanked back the yoke, dropped the flaps, and the plane lurched into the air with a wrenching g-force that felt like a fat man jumping on your heart.

Ten minutes later, over the Tehachapi Mountain Range, The Boys broke out the funny cigarettes, filling the cabin with smoke. I could protest, I suppose, but at that moment it felt necessary to join them.

Homeward bound, moments after Russ turned base to land the Tiger, he nearly crept up the tail of a twin-engined plane in the pattern ahead of us. "He's in the wrong place," Russ said as we shouted. I told The Boys my flying days were over, but sadly, I went again and again because I liked the pot. I was still terrified every take-off and landing, and Russ' barrel rolls, hammerheads, and other aerobatics did little to change things. My persistence in this case does not reflect upon me kindly.

New Equipment
Coming in from a delightful trip to the Yucatan, I found myself seated by my customary right-front window when the Mexicana Airlines 727 jerked up in a labored climb moments after it had descended to the runway at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. Out the window as we rose, you could see the planes crowding the runway where we had meant to land.

Terrifying. But that experience pales next to the Milan-bound charter I boarded in Toronto in 1985. Shortly after takeoff, the jet slid into a steep turn, dropped into the clouds below, and made an emergency landing. We learned after we had bussed to the relative safely of the terminal that a window had blown out in the cockpit and charts were flying around the cabin.

Hours later we boarded--unknowingly--the same aircraft, which made our landing across the ocean at Amsterdam's Schipol Airport far more exhilarating than the champagne they poured so freely to placate us. The brakes had burned up earlier on landing in Toronto. After it screeched to a stop, we left the plane and waited a few hours for, as the airlines love to say, new equipment.

Some Kind of Sayonara

It was freezing cold and the December winds failed to diminish the air pollution that draped Tokyo with an acrid cloud. My English teaching connections had foundered; I had had months of frustrations speaking broken Japanese; and I was tired of wedging through crowds of commuters no matter when or where I went. So I found a Dutch travel agency near the Ginza and asked the well-scrubbed clerk in his gray muffler if he could find me a bargain flight in any direction. I told him, "I want off the rock."

He said I'd get the biggest bang for my travel dollar by taking a Pakistani Airlines flight to Athens. I asked if it would be warm, and he lied. I imagined myself baking away on the Mediterranean, seated at a cafe with a glass of brandy in my hand, my eyes sheltered against the blazing sun. The ticket, in 1979 dollars, cost $280. Not bad for a trip halfway around the world.

What the travel agent neglected to tell me--along with his false promises of sunshine and souvlaki--was that the flight would take 26 hours from gate to gate, with plenty of stops along the way. I took my ticket, gathered up my backpack from the apartment in western Tokyo, and hopped an express train to the airport.

Once airborne, I discovered that I was the only Caucasian aboard a flight of Japanese businessmen, Chinese nationals, and a handful of Pakistanis. The announcements were made in Japanese, English, and Punjabi. I snapped a few pictures of Mt. Fuji through the window and settled back. It was an old-generation Boeing 707 and it looked it. At one point, the overhead cases swung open and the oxygen masks dropped out. They swung like jellyfish all the way to Beijing.

In 1979, we had yet to formalize relations with China, so when we landed in Beijing, I was told to remain seated until escorted down the ramp. The terminal looked like an old railroad depot with richly polished hardwood beams and rows of wooden benches. The locals all wore blue or green quilted jackets and matching Mao caps. You had to look carefully to make out the gender. One couple necked surreptitiously beneath a stairwell. I tried to escape out into the countryside a few times and was brought back to the terminal under escort of armed guards who were astonishingly kind and courteous.

I converted Yen into Chinese Yuan, not knowing that it would not be accepted anywhere else I might be flying, and bought tins analgesic balm and cigars as gifts. When my flight was announced, I attempted to cash the Yuan into dollars and was told it was impossible. They actually held the jet on the runway while I pleaded unsuccessfully with the teller in his cage.

The second stop was in Rawalpindi--known today as Islamabad. At three in the morning, the runway was a dark strip between dusty fields, with a small concrete terminal at one end. The only thing you heard was the stirring of the wind and barking Pakistani dogs in the distance. If I had wanted warmer temperatures, I got what I asked for. It was stifling and muggy.

I would have four hours to wait and was forbidden to leave the building. You could only buy some kind of pickled vegetable, Coca Cola (which seemed to have four times the sugar content as the American brand), and small cakes dipped in honey. I pressed through a crowd of beggars to find a seat in the dark recesses of the hall, clutching my backpack in my arms as I lay back and tried to nap. That was impossible. Within minutes, dozens of beggars surrounded me, pawing at my pack, murmuring with an insistent rhythm which kept up unceasingly for four hours.

When we finally took off in the last dark hour before dawn, I was seated beside a Japanese businessman who had boarded in Rawalpindi. He was going to Athens and we traded precious little across the language barrier. The last fuel stop was in Damascus, where the flight attendant advised me to stay on the plane. An American Jew, I had nightmares of what would happen to me had I wandered off. An hour later, you could make out the whitecaps on the waves as we sped into the clouds.

Below, in the seas where Paris, Marcus Antonius, and Odysseus had sailed, tiny islands caught bright shards of morning light. When I finally walked out on the tarmac in Athens, I found that I needed a jacket. I didn't really mind. I was a gravely inexperienced globetrotter and only 25. I would share a cab with the Japanese businessman to Democracy Square and later that evening under the Mediterranean moon, I would sit in a cafe and sob with relief.