Flying Without Going Insane

"Sir, I will go nuts if I don't ask, but are you an Air Marshal?" I think I developed a gift to spot Air Marshals on my flights: they always dress formally and never remove their jackets as to conceal the firearm underneath their armpits, never have a laptop with them, never drink any alcohol and never engage in a conversation. It must be a miserable job, after years of intense police training and high aspirations, to sit day after day in the aisle seat in economy class, to eat only the airport food, and to live weeks and weeks in boredom interrupted by possible moments of stark terror.

Worth knowing: Air Marshalls are not on the plane to protect passengers, they are there to protect pilots. If someone stands up and starts slashing throats, Air Marshall's job is not to stop the maniac. His job is to stand in front of the cockpit and use the force only if the activity switches from slashing to attempting to enter a flight deck. To simplify: passenger slashing is not his problem, it is your problem.

Yeah, I spend too much time sitting in airplanes and thinking of weird stuff. Many miles, many flights, much time in the air. To put it in perspective, I clock more hours in pressurized cabins than an average American spends reading per week. Well, thinking about it now, this tells me more about Americans than it tells me about my flying habits - but you get the point. All these hours I waste in the air, I need to distract myself with something amusing, or my engineering mind would rapidly descend into a crazy spiral of thoughts. And my crazy thoughts are driving me mad:

The pressure in the cabin is many times greater than the void outside, so think of the airplane as a pressurized oxygen tank with wings. An airplane is essentially a spray canister that wants to burst in the super-thin air up above the clouds. (Did you know that it is completely physically impossible to open the airplane door up in the air due to the cabin pressure? I do not recommend you to try it out, as fellow passengers might not appreciate the experiment...) Now, you saw thousands and thousands of rivets bonding the plane fuselage together, right? Those rivets really bother me. I never saw an oxygen tank using rivets to be stitched together - because rivets on the oxygen tank would never work! Gas would leak out from the tank at each and every rivet hole and provide the ideal conditions for a spectacular explosion - I heard that oxygen is perfect for things like that! Rivets are somehow still used in the aviation to stitch the airframe together, keeping that paper-thin metal sheet from bursting out and allowing the airplane to not hurl towards the ground insanely fast and in spectacular bursting flames. Oh, do you hear that hissing? Is this a rivet loosening up or is that just an air conditioning? How do those darn rivets work? Is there some magic involved? Help...

To distract my crazy engineering brain from going completely insane, I keep myself busy by observing people around me and trying to guess their stories. That young salesman in front of me, he is apparently working on his sales presentation ever since we took off. I just want to tell him, "They are never going to buy from you! Your Powerpoint slides suck!". I have gotten superb at hawk eyeing proposals from my seat; I can immediately tell if a sweaty sales associate has a shot at actually closing the deal, just by seeing the PPT deck. I really had no idea that Powerpoint slides can be so crappy - and I saw lots of Powerpoint decks in my career! For a start, let's try to put clipart animations to rest, please!

Talking about rest, the armrest between chairs stays down. It stays down for the entire duration of the flight, ok? Not up. Not semi-up. It stays down! I do not care how fat you are and how the narrow airplane chairs squeeze you. If your warm body oozes over and infringes into my personal space one more time, I swear I will cut you - the Air Marshall over there won't mind at all!

Where was I? Back to my happy thoughts. You see, when I am flying, I am working on building my empathy skills. I want to feel for that mother next to me with a screaming baby. And I want to feel for that entitled first class passenger who calls the flight attendant 'honey' and expects beverage service every 2 minutes. I feel for a farting man behind me who must be embarrassed about his case of explosive diarrhea. I feel for the bored, cramped and slightly obese air marshals. And above all, I feel for flight attendants who work shitty hours and deal with even shittier people - like me - all day long. They would appreciate if sometimes they could be treated like humans that have their own feelings, aspirations, and families to go home to at the end of their shift. Sometimes they deserve a smile. Oh, look, here she goes down the isle. Let me smile! Hi! (Ugh. Was that too much? Did she frown back at me?)

Now back to those darn rivets - how do they work?

If you liked this post, you might want to check my other musings.