On my last trip, I came down to the jetway before boarding to meet my new flight attendants. It’s not unusual for us to switch cabin crew throughout the day, so I go through the same get-to-know-you talk many times a trip. Generally, it’s a short get-to-know-you talk… literally, getting to know each other. But
If you fly for a living, you know the drill. The van drops you at the hotel. You drag your bag past the front desk. And suddenly you have 18 hours in a city you’ve been to so many times and never have actually seen. The blackout curtains are calling, or at least after you
A nearly full moon above. A layer of clouds below. The Earth looks tucked in, cozy. Goodnight Moon. Goodnight Earth. On nights like this, it looks like we’re flying over an extraterrestrial landscape rather than the third planet. Titan, to be exact. The largest moon of Saturn. It’s twice the size of our little moon.
I first met Matt in 2017. He was 18 and a passenger on our flight from Baltimore to Tampa, by way of Birmingham, headed to watch spring training with his dad. He was a true Southwest enthusiast; he’d talked his father into booking the flight with a stop instead of the nonstop so he could
CROSSPOST FROM https://stories.retro-exo.com/story/65/ I must have been in seventh or eighth grade. We had an IBM PCjr at home. I know it was bought for me. There was a kid sister in the house… a parent or two. I was the one who was interested in these things. I started out playing games on an
CROSSPOSTED FROM https://stories.retro-exo.com/story/21/ You know how you can tell the pilot in the room? They will tell you. Not so subtly waves from the corner. I’m 52 and a professional airline pilot. So, naturally, I have been ‘playing’ flight simulators my whole life. It started with Microsoft Flight Simulator (v2.0) with its glorious CGA graphics
Sometimes crews buddy-bid together so they can fly the same trip. For them, it’s like a road trip with a friend. For the rest of us, it’s like tagging along on their vacation. And sometimes they let you in on their little inside jokes. “She’s the one who was locked out of her hotel room
Quiet night over the Third Planet. Specifically, somewhere over West Texas. So many red dots down there, flashing in unison. Thousands of them blanket West Texas, flashing like a bunch of Operation board games, kids failing to pull out the funny bone at the exact same time. Oil rigs, in case you were wondering. There
From above, towns and cities and villages and parishes all look different. All tiny, but they share the same structures. The churches with their steeples glistening in the sun, and the schools with ballfields, tiny dots of players running like swarms of European starlings moving as one. Jails have geometric buildings that hold plenty of
The article (A Cookie Calling Card for Travelers) came out three days after my son was born, but the events in the story happened months earlier. It was one of those stories that gets written and then sits around waiting for a slow news day. Michael Stipe of R.E.M. once said he hoped to die
At 16 years old, moments are harder to come by these days that remind me he was once my little boy. “Did I do okay, Dad?” This was the first thing I heard him say upon coming to from sedation following a six-hour surgery. He was still on oxygen and talking through a mask. He
