Growing up, I was enamored of flight. I owned countless toy airplanes, innumerable faux pilot lapel pins, and very nearly decided I wanted to be a pilot myself at the age of five. My grandfather flew for Pan Am and would tell me stories about the early days of flight, stories that invariably involved stalled engines, or faulty landing gear. Using my age as a numbing agent, I was able to divorce the potentially tragic nature of those anecdotes - would any of those planes have gone down, I wouldn’t be here - from their unbridled spirit of adventure. But with age comes an inclination toward realism over adventure, and now those dynamic tales have taken on a distinctly terrifying tone.
Let’s be honest, air travel has got to be the second most stupid thing we humans have ever come up with (bested narrowly by the pet rock). I’m not speaking from the standpoint of engineering, no question it was a milestone in that area, but it calls into question the rationality of human behavior.

Consider the following:

Human beings collectively board 17 ton metal tubes and sip cocktails as they are thrust thirty thousand feet into the air for sustained periods of hours on end.

Air travel is madness, pure and simple! It’s the maniacal folly of a species deluded by arrogance. It’s the second most insane thing we do (the employment of “Head-On” to cure headaches being number one), and many of us do it without batting an eye, like it’s no different than hopping on a bike, or lacing up a pair of rollerblades. There are even those that are unperturbed by violent jostles of turbulence. I’m not talking about slight turbulence (though in the context of a thirty thousand foot flight, any bump, regardless of size, ought be enough to force anyone to buy a new pair of pants), I’m talking about sudden, hundred foot drop turbulence. I’m talking about soliciting your seat partner for one final fling before your trip into the hereafter turbulence. If you are of the persuasion that turbulence doesn’t warrant your concern, then your brain functions at the primitive end of the Darwinian bell curve. I don’t care how safe air travel is, for the good of the continuance of your gene pool, you should be white knuckling your seat! Calmness in the face of battery at a height of thirty thousand feet is a talent for which I have little understanding.
Of course, I know some people will say that air travel is extraordinarily safe. I know the likelihood of a crash, particularly a commercial crash, is wildly slim, but so was the career of Dane Cook, and now he’s headlining Madison Square Garden! The furtherance of the human species is dependent upon a heavy dose of fear. Would we have made it beyond our Neanderthal roots had our simian-faced ancestors rationalized…

“Well, I know a there are lions nearby, but statistically speaking, they’re more likely to go after hyenas than me.”
No! They heard lions, soiled their loincloths, and didn’t put on new ones until they got the hell out of there! Our instincts for survival have served us well in the past, and ought be heeded in the future.
So the next time you settle into your stiff as a rock airline seat (incidentally, what are those things constructed of, because I swear to God it feels like concrete), keep in mind that if your plane encounters any trouble, you have only yourself to blame for bucking against the laws of rationality, and that the likelihood of your survival from a thirty thousand foot plunge is extraordinarily slim… unless you’re wearing your seatbelt, in which case, I’m sure you’ll be fine.

Yours truly,
Gary

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