Come Fly with Me
I’m off on holidays a week today. 
Me, a big ol’ 767 and 209 other souls. I have to say I love 767’s. I especially love 767’s when they reach cruising height and the engines cut right back to nothing. That’s when the fun begins. As the Tayto ads say ‘There’s always one.’ In this case ‘the one’ tends to be a passenger who sits up suddenly and does a bit of a prairie dog in their seat, bouncing round and panicked.
The first time I flew on a 767 it was a bit of a shock, but I was flying with my family and my dad explained that it used a turbofan engine. My god, how nice to sit in near silence as opposed to that awful drone you get on a 737 or the Airbus 300 series. The last time I flew on a 767 was the trip to Goa. Citygirl had popped some sort of horse tranquiliser and was out for the count before boarding was finished. I was a bit bored and flicking through the on board magazine which contained - besides the ‘Welcome to Monarch Airlines’ and ‘Cities to visit’ articles - a short blurb on the plane. They included a paragraph that explained that once the 767 reached cruising altitude the engines went silent. I guess they’d had some incidents with passengers going stark raving bonkers and screaming about ‘We’re all going to die’ or something.
Anyway, while I prefer the 767 (wider aisles, quieter ride) I’m still a bit of a shit flier. I wasn’t always that way. When I was a kid I loved the roar of the engines and the G-force that shoved you back in your seat on take-off. Now I sit on the planes wondering if they are going fast enough to get off the ground and I hate that little stomach flip as the plane falls away from the ground. Turbulence is always bad, I don’t care how many times Lady E tells me ‘No plane ever crashed from turbulence.’ Tell that to the two rugby players who were sitting beside me on a flight back from Portugal. I think they’d have been down on their knees doing a decade of the rosary if the pilot hadn’t put the seatbelts sign on. Lightning storms are also bad. My sis, K, was on a flight somewhere over Russia a few years ago and the plane was hit by lightning. She saw the wing light up like a beach rave in Dollymount and wondered what the hell was going on until the pilot turned on the PA to say ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, you may have noticed some odd activity on the left side of the plane, we’ve just been struck by lightning, but my instrument panel is still working… at the moment.’
I also seem to be stuck on a lot of night flights, which may have something to do with my attacks of The Fear. The pic I’ve posted here was taken on a flight back from Rome which was one of the few daytime flights I’ve been on. But I digress…
Another thing I hate on planes is getting stuck in the middle seat. Because I don’t sleep on planes I prefer the aisle seat. That allows me to get up and wander round if I want to stretch my legs and also I hate feeling trapped. When I was about 16 I flew Toronto to Dublin in the middle seat. Now that’s a 7 or 8 hour flight depending on tailwind so there I was squashed in beside this fat, sweaty bloke who got the aisle seat and this chatty Canadian girl who wanted to know all about Ireland. About 2 hours into the flight both of them had fallen asleep and the bloke had slumped to rest his head on my left shoulder and the girl was drooling on my right. I did that polite throat clearing thing for a bit as I wasn’t able to move as they both had me pinned to the seat. Eventually I just snapped forward to dislodge them. Rather than waking and re-arranging themselves in their own seats they slipped further into mine. So now I was left sitting forward about 10 degrees shy of the crash position and they had taken over my headrest. I ended up waking both of them up by the clever use of elbows.
For my flight next Thursday I’ve pre-booked aisle seats. No way I’m going to be squashed in the middle seat on a 9 hour flight.
