Life Above the Clouds

Air Travel Remains A Novelty To This Writer

Two weeks ago I flew to Southern California and spent a week in Santa Monica. It was my first trip to California since I was eleven and my first experience with air travel since 9/11. My, oh my, how things have changed.

I was fortunate enough to fly out of Hickory on Delta Airlines to Atlanta before boarding a jumbo jet to Los Angeles International (LAX). Delta has recently announced that it will discontinue its twice-daily shuttles from Hickory to Atlanta at the end of November. If you can find an excuse to use this service before it disappears, I urge you to do so. The fares are reasonable, the folks at the Hickory Airport are not the automatons you find at bigger airports, and the place features The Runway Café, perhaps the only airport eatery in the nation where you can get eggs, bacon, pancakes (or toast), hash-browns and coffee for under five bucks.

Somewhere Over New Mexico. Photo by Jeff Eason.

The Runway Café is truly the only airport restaurant I’ve ever seen where hungry folks with neither flight to catch nor person to pick up will come in for a quick meal. You can also match your wits with the regulars at the diner’s counter when Jeopardy and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire are on the café television.

Another reason to patronize the Delta shuttle out of Hickory is the cool 40-seater jets that they use to fly to Atlanta. You get a real sense of fighting gravity in these planes as they go from a dead stop, screech down the runway and become airborne in a mere 25 seconds. I had the window seat near the wing and when the retractable landing gear folded up under my butt it made a sickening metallic thud not dissimilar to some sort of mechanical failure. Very cool.

The flight to Atlanta takes about 45 minutes and literally about the time the jet stops climbing, its starts to descend. During the past two decades, the ground-scape between Charlotte and Atlanta has become one giant suburban sprawl of neighborhoods and business complexes lining the I-85 corridor, interrupted only by the vast watery expanses of Hartwell Lake and Lake Sidney Lanier in Georgia. The population density of the Southeast didn’t really hit home until later that day when I contrasted it to the huge unpopulated areas of the Southwest.

From the friendly confines of the Hickory Airport, I was transported in less than an hour’s time to Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport, the busiest airport in the world with an estimated 80 million passenger arrivals and departures each year! Hartsfield is so large that it is necessary to have its own subway system to transport passengers from one concourse to another. Its runway area is so extensive that you cannot see some of the planes because of the curvature of the earth!

Hartsfield is also one of the last airports in the country to feature smoking lounges for its customers who like the occasional cigarette while waiting for a connecting flight. These lounges look like glass terrariums the size of boxcars, filled with smoke, weary travelers and the most disgusting smoldering ashtrays you’ve ever seen. From the outside the lounges look like dioramas in a museum. You can almost hear the tour guide say, “Before smoking tobacco became completely illegal in this country, cigarette addicts would gather in secret dens to puff butts, relax and compare Bic lighters. Today, of course, this craving for relaxation is handled with prescription drugs.”

From Hartsfield, I boarded one of Delta’s jumbo jets for LAX. For those of you who don’t fly often or keep up with American business news, I must at this time point out that Delta Airlines filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 in mid-September. One of the primary reasons for this move is the company does not think it will be able to fulfill its pension obligations to its pilots, baggage handlers, flight attendants and other employees as many of these Baby Boomers approach retirement age. It is a pension problem exacerbated by poor investment decisions and one that plagues several other airlines as well as General Motors at this time.

Despite their jobs and retirement pensions being in jeopardy, every single Delta employee I met treated me with the utmost courtesy and respect. It made me wonder what sort of attitude I would have at work if I knew that executives in my company getting paid twenty times my salary had squandered my retirement benefits. I decided that I would probably be a little surly and short with people and that made me admire those Delta employees even more.

Once again I had a primo window seat and settled in to enjoy the scenery of our country for a few hours. I figured everyone else with a window seat would do the same. Imagine my surprise to learn that most people with a window seat on airlines immediately close their shutters so they can better watch television.

Here’s a brief summary of what those people missed. Along the Mississippi River Delta you can actually see where debris from Hurricane Katrina has piled up on banks and in corners of the bayous. Over midland Texas there are crop circles created by revolving irrigation systems—perfectly round circles of green that are miles and miles in diameter. In the badlands of New Mexico there are mountains and valleys so red and deserted that they look more like parts of the Martian landscape than anything that might be found on earth.

I sat mesmerized by our American landscape for the majority of my four-hour flight to Los Angeles. During the early part of the journey, most of my fellow passengers read, slept or watched the in-flight movie, Batman Begins. It was about 3 p.m. Pacific Time when we passed over the heart of the Grand Canyon, one of the most spectacular sights I have ever witnessed. The afternoon shadows made each mesa and cliff stand out it stark relief. From 34-thousand feet in the air, I could actually see how ancient rivers tore the soft rock from the escarpments and turned the scene into one of the natural wonders of the world. It was so beautiful that I almost wept.

Most of my fellow travelers at this time had their shutters drawn so they could watch—I am not making this up—a rerun of Bewitched. Not the new movie with Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, but a grainy rerun of the original 1960s television series starring Elizabeth Montgomery.

I had to resist the temptation to stand up and yell, “Turn off the TV, you morons! It’s the Grand Canyon down there!”

I’m glad I resisted that temptation because from what I understand they frown on such public displays of emotional yelling during transcontinental flights these days.

In next week’s Sweet Tea with Lemon: What I Did on My California Vacation.