Airplane travel

We don’t travel on airplanes, we are shipped from one location to another like parcels of fish.

Sure, there are windows from which we can observe the clouds, if any, and the topography, which looks so little like the maps we’ve filed in our memories that we can barely recognise our location. That’s why some like to watch the display of the flight path over a vaguely aerial view of the ground. The alternative is to watch a movie, which seems a more honest admission that we can’t experience flight as travel.

Travel requires not only movement, but the sensation, the awareness, the feeling of movement. There is none such when we fly in a modern aircraft. The plane may as well be standing still somewhere in space with the surroundings flowing past. A car isn’t much different: we sit still in the car, and the road, the landscape, the air move past us. Does this mean the car is moving? Hard to say, until something interrupts the motion of the car, and we move inside the car and possibly out of it. The absence of the sensation of movement explains why driving and flight simulators work so well.                                
Travel requires agency. We move ourselves, by moving our limbs. We move across and through our surroundings. In a plane, in a car, in a train, we are carried by the machine. The only machine that enables us to travel is the bicycle, which we cause to move by moving our limbs, just as we cause our body to move by moving our limbs.

“Travel by airplane” misrepresents what’s actually happening. The plane transports us, just as it transports our bags.  Just like a parcel of fish.