Christopher Schaberg - Airplane Reading

First published by Zero Books, 2016

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Text copyright: Christopher Schaberg & Mark Yakich 2015

ISBN: 978 1 78279 818 7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015958684

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

The rights of Christopher Schaberg & Mark Yakich as authors have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Design: Stuart Davies

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And here we are again, heading to the airport. One of us is filled with a kind of ongoing delight, and one of us has just eaten a banana and Xanax for breakfast. In this forest-green Subaru Forester, were not exactly commuting to work, and yet perhaps we are.

It was six years ago when we met each other for the first timeat an airports curbsideand only weeks thereafter we began writing collaborative pieces about air travel. Since then, airliners have been lost and found, been grounded and re-approved for safe flight, shot out of the sky with ballistic missiles, and taken off and landed, day in and day out, a thousand unremarkable flights each hour, on and on.

In that timethe days and yearsweve gathered hundreds of air-travel stories, first on our website airplanereading.org and now a selected number in this book. These stories range from the humorous and odd to serious and sad, spanning the spectrum of emotions and experiences associated with flight.

Our book does not express a unified interpretation of air travel, but rather seeks to reflect a broad swath of peoples observations and reflections: of sitting around the airport, being in the air, waiting for takeoff or landing. Yet there is something apocryphal about this book, too. The perspectives shared in this book are not uniformly upbeat; they are frequently wary of this whole enterprise called flight. At the same time, there are moments of sublimity and enlightenment as our contributors ponder airborne existence.

The stories in this book are by regular travelers, frequent flyers, and occasional aviators.

And who are we?

One of us used to work at an airport and has written articles and books about the culture of flight. The other used to live abroad, regularly flying across continents, and slowly but steadily developed a fear of flying, along with a penchant for poetry.

And where are we now, as we write the introduction to this book?

Weve arrived at the Lakefront Airport on the east side of New Orleans. Theres virtually no security, no problem parking, and almost no one around. As part of post-Katrina rebuilding, this airport has been restoredjust this yearto its original 1930s glamour. On the outside, workers have removed 1960s concrete structures (placed there so that the building could be used as a nuclear-fallout shelter) to reveal a stunning art-deco facade; and on the inside, an artist is in the process of restoring seven paintings by Xavier Gonzalez that depict the early age of flight.

Turns out the restaurant and bar is closed on Mondays, but a woman in black sweats let us into the caf and here we are sitting at a two-top with no one else in sight. Small private aircraft taxi, take off, and land out on the runway, mere feet away from us as we write. It is strange to be here by ourselves. Its like being at a museum in the off-hours. But it is only mid-morning, and some kind of small plane sits nearby, with United States of America emblazoned on its fuselage, and were speculating about whether its FBI, CIA, or secret service. Theres no particular reason for our speculation, except that were at the airport and, if nothing else, airports still seem to be one of the few places left to enjoy undirected daydreaming.

Another jet sits nearby, and this one, a Gulfstream 6, dons a legible tail number: N305KNbut further information about this plane is blocked when googled. One of us remarks that this would be the airport, as opposed to Louis Armstrong International, for shady business deals and corresponding clandestine flight plans. If the airport feels charmingly dated, it also lends itself to new airplanes potentially charged with intrigue and espionage. Seemingly on cue, a sleek-looking Avanti Evo now taxis by, as if right off the set of Miami Vice.

One of us is staring off into the distance, thinking about the perfectly trimmed grass between the runways and how ideal it would be to install a soccer pitch right there. Or better yet, what a lovely place for a cemetery. What would it be like to be buried alongside a runway, underneath wide-open, tree-less skies? And what would it be like to land amid rows of headstones and above-ground mausoleums?

The other one of us is snapping pictures of an old Eastern Air Lines air stair, whose tarnished gray metal and defunct logo appear at odds with the gleaming white Gulfstream fifty feet away. Decades of disparate aviation endeavors slice across the tarmac here, and we sit nearby, neutral observersas if.

Across the runway rest two WWII bombers: one a B-17 Flying Fortress, the other a B-29 Superfortress. A good portion of the airborne violence of the twentieth centurysymbolically if not literally speakingsitting calmly in an autumn rain, the leftovers of Hurricane Patricia which slammed into Mexico a few days ago. We each noticed over the weekend when one of these planes circled over the city, its unfamiliar drone thundering abovelooking now, we learn that there was an Air Power Expo here over the weekend. This B-29 is named FIFIthe last of the B-29s still flying. The Lakefront Airport is a strange whorl of aviations decadesstill in process, patterns vaguely the same.

Being in this airport is like inhabiting the whole history of flight. Or is that the case with being in any airport, staring out at a runway horizon? The expanse reaching from here to there has never really changed all that much.

A swarthy bank of gray clouds is descending on us, barreling over Lake Pontchartrain. One of us is happy that we dont have to fly today; the other wouldnt mind a brief trip aboard one of the old bombers, as civilians could have purchased over this past weekend at the expo for the cool price of $1500.

We only came out here to get a certain distance from our daily lives, to harness some of the imagination that sparks airplane reading. Its about wonder, history, beauty, existential dread, even deathand its about how flight can swoop into our lives, and depart just as easily.

Its lunchtime, and now three separate couples and families have poked their heads into the cafe. Anybody here? From around the corner, stationed at our table, we tell them: No, sorry, were closed todayopen Tuesday through Sunday. Its seamless. They think we work here. And we do, in a curious way.