McNutt Against the Music

I love airports. And I love flying, though I haven’t had the chance to do it very often in the past several years (I think my last flight was for debating nationals three years ago). As someone who goes on bus trips with great regularity and spent three summers traveling every highway in Nova Scotia, there’s a certain novelty to warping halfway across the country in a couple of hours. Although having said that, it does bring with it some significant side effects (such as forgetting that you’re actually in a different city, and making comments about Halifax all weekend long).

I got back into Toronto yesterday after a weekend of concerts that I’m anxious to review here at the blog (Death Cab for Cutie and Stars tomorrow; R.E.M., Modest Mouse and the National on Friday), but I had to share this quick anecdote first. One of the reasons that I love airports and airplanes is that with so much downtime waiting for the plane, flying on the plane, and waiting for the lightning to end so the plane can land, it’s a great opportunity to catch up on my periodicals. I usually factor $30 or so into my budget so that I can gather some current affairs and entertainment literature for my journey.

This trip was the usual assortment: the latest issues of Spin, The Atlantic and Wired on the trip to Toronto; the newest Entertainment Weekly and The Economist on the journey back home. It was Wired that I first cracked open waiting in Stanfield Airport in Halifax bright and early on Thursday morning. Now, if you don’t read Wired, they have this “How to…” section where they explain in Coles-notes form the basics behind all sorts of quirky and wonderful things.

Reaching the latest edition of the article, here’s what I find:

You might think that having this article in-hand just before taking to the skies would have a comforting effect on me. You would be wrong. I was overcome with a crippling panic because now I had a moral responsbility to act in the case of emergency.

Prior to reading the article, if a crisis were to emerge that rendered the pilots incapacitated, someone else could take up the charge: someone braver, someone with more bravado, someone more gutsy. But now, having read this article, there’s a good chance that I may have been the third most knowledgeable person on that aircraft when it comes to plane landing (I don’t know how much West Jet’s cabin crew learn about airplane flying in their training). I’d be compelled to act regardless of my mental and physical fortitude to handle the situation.

Never in my life have I been scared of flying; not even on a really rough flight to Newfoundland a few years back. But this trip, with the knowledge of my new moral responsibility? I won’t lie to you – I think I gripped the arm of my seat just a little bit tighter every bump of air we hit…

Watch: Tom Petty – “Learning to Fly”