Tag Archives: flight

If only I could fly

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I find nothing more majestic than a bird of prey in flight. I love seeing them riding thermals, soaring effortlessly and gracefully. I’m enthralled by their speed and precision when they strike at their next meal.

But more than anything it’s the idea of flying wholly and completely free. Of being an apex animal on the food chain unworried about being hunted, and able to be in command of the sky, fearless and without a concern.

Birds have the freedom to travel in any direction. Gravity suggests only a direction of downward and is not a limiting force. The wind is a friend, an ally that dispels the pull towards the earth which limits land animals from venturing too far upwards.

If only I could fly. I’d do it for the pure joy of the act, as I believe birds of prey do. It’s not just about the hunt. It’s not only to get from one destination to another. It’s an act of pure enjoyment… a chance to be free.

Sleeping on a plane

I still marvel at the idea of large planes traveling with the weight of people and luggage, defying gravity, thanks to forward propulsion and Bernoulli’s Principle. It still seems like magic to me. But the cost of this miraculous feat is such that people are squeezed into planes like sardines. This is not conducive to seats that are comfortable for sleeping.

That’s not a big deal for short flights, but on long trips, and multiple trips with layovers, that extend over several time zones, the lack of sleep is less than desirable. For me, travelling east is harder than travelling west, and getting some good sleep on the trip would be desirable… but not achievable.

Every time I do a trip like this I think, there must be an app that helps you plan your trip such that you reduce jet lag. But, I don’t travel enough to actually make the effort, and besides, even if I did, I still wouldn’t be able to get the recommended sleep suggested.

I just had a 4.5 hours flight from Vancouver to Toronto that was delayed almost 2 hours. Then power walked to a gate that felt 2 kilometres away to arrive at the gate for our our next flight about 20 minutes before boarding. That was a 7+ hour flight from Toronto to Paris. Now we’ve just finished a 4 hour layover and have a 2 hour flight to Barcelona. I’m tired. I didn’t sleep enough, but I’m afraid to even try sleeping now for fear of getting up in the middle of the night ready to start the day.

My strategy for not being able to sleep on a plane is to fight sleep until regular bedtime in my new time zone. It doesn’t make for a very comfortable travel day, but hopefully I won’t be falling asleep on my first full day in my new destination. Wish me luck.

Everyday amazing

I’ve always been amazed by airplane flight. I don’t truly understand Bernoulli’s principle and the idea that so much weight can be lifted off the ground based simply on propulsion and lift under carefully designed wings still seems unlikely to me. And yet in less than 30 minutes the plane I’m on is going to taxi down a runway and start a 4,239 KM (2,634 mile) trek across (about half of) one of the largest countries in the world… and I’ll be sitting on a runway in Vancouver in 5 hours. Amazing.

We spend a lot of our day taking full advantage of technology we don’t really understand. I’m holding a phone that will magically publish this post to the internet, where it will sit on a website, all the while not knowing how this all works or what http stands for? I can talk to someone half way around the world with virtually no delay in the conversation, but sound travels much slower than that. I will listen to my wireless headphones without knowing how Bluetooth works. All around us we use advances in technology, taking advantage of tools most of us barely understand.

But this ignorance can work against us. Without really understanding the world around us, some people make shit up and think it’s science. How can anyone believe in a flat earth in this day and age of flight? And that’s not even the craziest thing people believe! It’s one thing to be blissfully ignorant of the world around us, and yet another to think that conspiracies live everywhere and that our opinions matter as much as the science.

Two amazing things that surround us:

1. The mystery and marvels of technology and innovation.

2. The blind ignorance of humanity to how this all works.

I’m not sure the gap between these two are getting any closer. The more amazing the the technology, the greater the opportunity for conflagration of lies, deceit, and exaggeration of fears into a dumpster fire of conspiracies, ‘fake news’, and ‘alternative facts’… with people knowingly and unknowingly adding fuel to the flames.

But for now, it’s time to put my phone on airplane mode, take advantage of having a window seat, and stare out at a runway… Marvelling at how this massively heavy plane can leave the surface of the earth, and soar for hours, trusting the science of it without really understanding how it all works.