One Million Miles
How much time have I spent on airplanes?
I recently crossed the one million mile mark on American Airlines.
Air travel beats me up. I don’t fit in an economy seat well, so I end up with bruises and scratches on my shins and calves that I can’t identify. And I am convinced that I catch cold more easily when I’m flying. On one of my recent flights, the man next to me said, “They don’t make these seats for guys like us.” He’s right. They make them for people in clothing ads who weigh 98 pounds, which is approximately the size of one of my legs.
I remember flying as a boy. At that time, people dressed up to fly, and it felt like something special. We would fly as a family down to visit my grandfather in Florida for Spring break. Planes were not as pressurized then as now, and I often got airsick. One of my brothers would be eating snacks and drinking soda, and I was losing my lunch.
Now flying feels like a time to relax. I read, I listen to music, and I sleep. I see other people who are anxious, but I am generally pretty comfortable. There have only been a handful of times when anything odd happened.
Most commercial planes fly at about 500 miles per hour, which means I’ve spent at least 2000 hours, or about a year of work, on planes. I’ve been flying on American Airlines since 1984, when the venture capital firm I was working for gave me an AAirpass card, and I flew over 230,000 miles that year. I was never home. Of course, this doesn’t even count all the time I’ve spent getting to the airport early, waiting for planes, or staying overnight in some city because my plane was cancelled. That’s probably the equivalent of another work-year. And then there are those flights I took on other airlines for some reason.
There are some strange things in the air. While some business and first class seats have three point restraints, like cars; coach seats never do. Are those people more worth saving? The rules on planes are not uniformly enforced. I have never seen a flight attendant tell someone with two big bags that they have to check one; and I have seen lots of people take their pets out of their travel cages while we were in the air, which is never supposed to happen. One service dog pooped in the aisle. I’ve been on flights where the person next to me never switched their phone to airplane mode, or where people put their bare feet on the armrest in front of them, in the next row. I’ve had little children kicking my seat for an entire flight, and a drunk woman fall asleep on my arm. I’ve sat next to nice people and idiots. I figure I’ve also eaten about 40,000 peanuts and 15,000 pretzels. Maybe a few less than that.
When I passed a million miles, I guess I expected something to happen.
The world is a big place. Ten seconds into a flight and $300 million airplanes look like toys on the ground, and cars on the highway look like ants. Fifteen minutes from every big city I know of outside of the East Coast, and the ground looks uninhabited. Seeing things from the air gives me a different perspective — we are all such tiny specks in the grand universe.
For some, this isn’t a big deal. People who fly frequently overseas can get a million miles much quicker than those of us who fly mostly in the US. It took me about 40 years to do it. But a million of anything is a lot. (Take a look at the most useless site on the internet — onemillioncheckboxes.com, for an example.) For me, a million miles feels significant somehow.
Every time I fly it feels like a small miracle. When I get off the plane, it takes a minute for me to realize that I really am in a new place, far away from where I started. There is a part of me that feels like it is a trick; someone has just changed the backdrop on the stage while I was locked up in a tube that bucked and rolled.
When I passed a million miles, I guess I expected something to happen. I’m not sure what — confetti, I guess. Or a luggage tag in the mail. Something. I did finally get an email saying congratulations. I guess American is more concerned about getting their next customer than doing anything for an old one.
I still like to travel, but flying has become more and more uncomfortable. The seats are smaller and the planes are often at capacity. Now when I board a plane it feels like I am getting on a bus more than anything else. The big busses in Mexico that go from city to city are actually more comfortable than planes. Maybe someday flying will feel fun again. In the meantime, it continues to get me where I am going, which I guess is what really counts.
