Flying used to be glamorous. I’m talking about the golden age—suits, silk ties, champagne served by flight attendants with teeth so perfect they could light up a runway. It was the Concorde, it was Pan Am, it was James Bond having a Vodka Martini “shaken, not stirred”.
Now? It’s not travel. It’s airborne livestock logistics. It’s a cattle drive at 35,000 feet, except the cows these days have smartphones, feels overly privileged and have opinions about everything. They moo. They chew. And some of them… smell like they’ve been fermenting in a tent at the burning man festival.
Welcome to modern aviation.
Over the years, I’ve flown to all sorts of places—for work, vacations, questionable weddings—and with every boarding pass comes a silent prayer: “Please, for the love of all that is holy, let me sit next to someone normal.” Not a weirdo. Not an armrest hog. Just normal. Preferably unconscious for most of the flight. But alas, fate is a sadist.
A flight from Paris to New York should be a breeze. I’ve got my British passport in hand, ready to be charming and vaguely annoyed. But the French flight attendant, clearly moonlighting as a bouncer at the Arc de Triomphe, sees my ID and hears my accent—or the lack thereof. Her eyebrows levitate.
“What citizen are you?” she sneers, as if I’d confessed to microwaving a croissant.
“British,” I say.
She squints. “Where are you from?”
“Britain,” I repeat, now louder, in case she’s not only suspicious but also deaf.
Then an American girl from Cincinnati pipes up behind me with the subtlety of a foghorn in a barn, “I’m American! From America!”
And turns to the stewardess with wide-eyed wonder. “Are you French? From France?”
The stewardess looked like someone had just insulted her beret, her wine, and her grandmother’s cheese.
Then there was Philadelphia to Santa Ana. I had the immense privilege of sitting next to a woman who talked about tomatoes for five hours. She worked for Hunt’s, which apparently gave her full diplomatic authority on tomato culture. Roma, heirloom, beefsteak, diced, pureed, sun-dried—if tomatoes were a religion, she was the Pope. I tried sleeping. Didn’t work. She infiltrated my dreams like a fruit Freddy Krueger. “You ever fire-roast them?” she whispered as I woke up sweating. I checked my pulse and my sanity.
But even that was fine compared to the long-haul torture chamber from New York to Hong Kong. Behind me? A couple with a baby. Now, I get it—babies cry. Ears pop. But this baby? This baby had lungs like an opera singer and the fury of a Viking berserker. Fifteen hours it seems. Straight. No breaks. Just a continuous scream that vibrated the fuselage like a tuning fork of doom.
I had noise-cancelling headphones. I believed in them. But halfway through, they died. And what replaced them was the soundtrack of a soul being evicted through a baby the size of a cantaloupe. When we landed, the immigration officer took one look at me and said, “Rough flight?”
I said, “I think I qualify for combat pay.”
And then came the pandemic. I used to fly from Richmond to Boston every weekend. Pre-COVID, no big deal. During COVID? It felt like starring in a low-budget sci-fi horror film. You’d board the plane and every passenger looked like they were about to face off with the CDC. Sanitizer. Wipes. They’d wipe their seat, tray table, armrest, oxygen mask. Some even wiped the pilot.
A sneeze was treated like biological warfare. If someone coughed, the entire cabin reacted like someone had pulled the pin on a grenade. People flinched, ducked, added a second mask, and then poured Purell over themselves like it was holy water. I’m fairly certain someone near me muttered a Hail Mary and burned sage.
And let’s not forget the usual cast of in-flight degenerates:
The guy who snores like a Harley on gravel.
The woman who opens an entire Subway footlong and eats it like it’s her first meal since 1996.
The guy who removes his shoes and socks, like we’re on his open porch.
And then, of course, the silent assassin. The fart saboteur. The gaseous gladiator. British gas. The person who turns the cabin into a pressurized Dutch oven, then pretends it’s all perfectly normal.
But let’s be honest—none of that compares to this:
Have you ever flown during turbulence or a thunderstorm?
Now, I’m an engineer. I trust technology more than most. I understand aerodynamics, stress tolerances, redundancy systems. But when the plane suddenly lurches, drops 500 feet in half a second, or just makes one of those unnerving mechanical groans—there’s always that split-second where your brain goes: “Welp. This is it. This is how I die. In 14C. Next to a hairy woman eating jalapeño chips.”
Everyone reacts differently. Some go dead silent, faces pale as ghosts. Others scream. Some grip the armrest like it’s the last lifeboat on the Titanic. And then there are the ones who just pass out entirely, like fainting goats.
Me? I enjoy it.
There’s something morbidly exhilarating about being reminded that we’re just squishy humans flying through weather at 600 miles an hour, held up by physics and a bit of hope. That brief moment when mortality taps you on the shoulder and says, “Hey, don’t get too comfortable.”
And yet—despite the noise, the smells, the turbulence, the weirdos, and the airborne tomatoes—I keep flying. We all do.
Because it’s not really about the journey. And let’s be honest, it’s rarely about the destination either.
It’s about surviving the flight without duct-taping someone to the emergency exit.
Thanks for dropping by my little corner of the world. If the story gave you a chuckle or made you pause and think, a like would be mighty kind. And if you’re feeling adventurous, well, hitting that subscribe button is like pulling up a chair and staying a while—always room for one more.
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A Kings 
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