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“Thank you, Jesus…”

… said the woman sitting behind me as our plane gently touched down in Phoenix. She’d talked throughout the flight about what a bad flyer she was, and this made UD happy because UD is a bad flyer but not as bad as that woman.

At Baltimore Washington Airport, UD had bought a magazine of New Yorker cartoons, and a magazine with glossy photos of the world’s best spas, to distract her from the ordeal, and it worked. She was distracted from thoughts of how beyond-belief surreal and depressing it would be to perish inside of a flying can with a bunch of strangers.

Mr UD, who claims to have slept through a landing at the Baghdad airport during the Iraq War, had no sympathy at all for UD‘s nerves and said all the obvious stuff about how safe flying is blahblah.

Phoenix appeared out of the black night, a plain of golden lights.

We’ve settled into our hotel, had dinner, had several friendly conversations about what to see and do, and are now ready for bed.

I’ll get back to regular blogging tomorrow.

Margaret Soltan, January 6, 2012 1:54AM
Posted in: snapshots from home

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2 Responses to ““Thank you, Jesus…””

  1. MattF Says:

    You may or may not be comforted to learn that experts in fluid mechanics get into vehement arguments over how airplanes fly. I once asked an expert about this and he informed me (with some irritation) that the Kutta-Joukowski Theorem was proved a long time ago. FYI, though:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutta–Joukowski_theorem

  2. aek Says:

    I used to correspond with several air traffic controller bloggers. They will make you feel all kinds of safe, even whilst railing about their hideous work conditions, failed equipment (they haul out their cell phones and make do, even though it’s “against the FAA rules” when the equipment goes kaput), and spectacularly strangulating politics, and they will go balls to the wall as they would be the first to say to guide you from point to point safely.

    Don Brown’s Get the Flick blog is fantastic, if you’re so inclined. http://gettheflick.blogspot.com/

    Glad you’re enjoying AZ!

    Best-

    aek

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