Tin Can with Wings

I always wonder as I board an airplane if I will ever get off of it again. There is something fundamentally wrong with human beings hurtling through the sky hundreds of feet off of the ground in a tin can with wings.   What possessed the Wright Brothers to invent such an outlandish device? On our flight from JFK to Cairo I sat cramped in my tiny seat , thankfully next to the aisle and suffered for what felt like decades rather than hours (I HATE trans-atlantic flights). The flight was bumpy, which I heard was common for this route. The other passengers seem calm and composed. The lady across the isle was knitting; the man next to her was fast asleep. Inherently a nosy person, I wondered if they are related, and why they are, like me, forcing themselves to travel by these means. They were probably not on their way to race camels across the blistering desert to the pyramids.  Sitting there, knitting and snoring unaware of my silent ponderings, they do not come across as the adventurous type. But there are always closet thrill seekers; I guess one can never know.

If it were possible, I would like to fly superman style. Just me and the clouds. If there was another way to move from one place to another with the same speed as an airplane, I am sure it would be much more popular than stuffing people and their luggage into a metal cylinder, then launching it through the clouds.

Throughout the flight, I was jolted out of my ipod induced semi-asleep trance, up and down like a yo-yo the plane jerked on an invisible string. We are all going to die. There is no way that that flying contraption should have held together with all of the bumping going on. (Not that it was an old or shabby plain at all, it was actually one of the nicer ones, but still...) Up down, up down. Eventually the plane settled into the air.  And obviously, no one died. Although not for lack of trying. Once Captain Kangaroo bounced us to the terminal, the everyone more than ready to get off.