Flying across the sea

Airline Travel, 13-14 May

I am growing less tolerant of air travel the older I get. This trip was a mixed bag. On the plus side, I flew out of Asheville, which was convenient. Also, the transatlantic flight, on US Air this time, was actually very nice. The plane was a very new Airbus A330, the sheer size of which seemed to add to the smoothness of the flight. The pilot managed to shave nearly an hour of the expected travel time, getting us on the ground in Madrid in just under 6.5 hours. The landing was perhaps the best-executed which I have ever experienced.

However, all was not well. The flight from Charlotte to Philadelphia was excessively miserable. I was in the rear-most seat, which is more narrow than usual, and does not recline. Moreover, I got to sit between two strangers, one of whom clutched the barf-bag throughout the journey. The best, however, was the pilot’s emergency maneuvering at the end. The plane was below tree-top level, within a few feet of the ground, when the pilot hit the thrusters and sent the plane into an aggressive climb back to about 3000 feet. A few seconds later he explained, over the intercom, that we nearly hit another plane on the runway which “could not get out of the way in time”… Nice.