THE ATTITUDE OF ALTITUDE

"Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings" 
                          - John Gillespie Magee, Jr

The View from Up Top.

Rift 

Whenever I'm given the option of whether to sit on the aisle or next to the window, I usually opt for the window. (The middle seat, poor thing, is pretty much the bastard child of seat assignments. Nobody wants the center seat, and nobody in the aisle or window seats really want another passenger to sit there either. Anyone who tells you they want the center is either a liar, or needs serious therapy. Or both.) 

For me the window seat provides perhaps the truest sense of traveling adventure you can get on a modern airliner. Sitting in the aisle seat certainly makes for more convenience when making a bid for the head (restroom), but the view is pretty much the same as you would get on the aisle in any standard pre-stadium-seating movie theater -- without the big screen or filmed entertainment. More claustrophobic in fact, given the much lower ceiling, narrower aisle and the tightness of the seating arrangement.

Honolulu departure

(As you can tell, I try like the dickens to avoid being caught in that airliner Purgatory known as the "center seat" -- usually only suffering that ignominy when I am traveling with my lovely bride. I'll take the seat so she can have aisle or window...she prefers the window, most times, for exactly the above reasons.)

Anyway.

Regardless of the time of day -- daylight hours being preferable, of course -- the view out the window is usually pretty fascinating. An overcast day or long voyage over an ocean being exceptions to the rule, most of the time the window offers something far more fascinating to look at versus the seatback in front of you.

Window seat, please

Yosemite

(One of my more recent travel-related activities is photographing things from above. I've begun collecting airports, shorelines, mountains...or other geological features which we can't see from the ground, and go unseen in a center or aisle seat. Consigned to either of those seats I usually sit in mild annoyance when the person at the window sits and reads...or worse, draws the shade and sleeps. Grrrr.)

Looking out of an airliner's window and seeing the world from above was something I learned to love at an early age. It might also be the source of my acrophobia, but that's a supposition for another time.

From my childhood travels I recall one flight in particular, in which we were on a trip from Boston's Logan Airport to Los Angeles International. This would place it in the very late sixties, or 1970. 

(Given that it was a transcontinental flight, I'd tend to think we were in a Boeing 707, perhaps the most legendary aircraft of the commercial jet age. It's entirely possible this was my first trip in a jet. I would have been nine. While I'd traveled by air before it's more likely that those trips had been on the then more common Lockheed Constellation class of propeller-driven aircraft. And while it may have been the first 707 I'd ridden it would be far from the last.)

Real crop circles...

 http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20141020-the-plane-that-changed-air-travel 

(But I digress.)

As noted above, I prefer  the window seat. I love looking down at the world as it passes by, seemingly just below my feet. On this one particular voyage, we were crossing over the northernmost portion of Arizona. I know this because of what happened next. The pilot came on the overhead -- remember, this was the heyday of the JetSet experience we all remember so vividly and probably incorrectly -- and let everyone know we were rapidly approaching one of the greatest views on Earth: The Grand Canyon.

PHX airport

This, of course, got me very excited. Never having been there, my boyish perception of the Grand Canyon was based largely on a handful of TV documentaries and the Grand Canyon diorama at Disneyland. And now I was to see it for myself, at a height of thirty thousand feet. 

I was giddy with anticipation...right up until the point the Captain decided BOTH sides of the aircraft deserved a view. 

Um...mountains?

Slowly the plane banked first one way, and then the other, giving the window seats on both sides of the aisle a special downward view of the vast geologically ancient slash through the northern Arizona highlands. The cabin swung itself around dizzyingly as we rolled from side to side. Not good if you've got an eight-year-old's nascent fear of heights. Somehow I realized this was not how an aircraft should operate. What had been a relatively uneventful flight was seared into my memory for -- at this point -- four plus decades as most assuredly not the way I like to fly.

(I recognize, some 45 years later, my memory must be somewhat exaggerated. I'm almost certain the pilot did not bank at 30 degrees to either side despite my stomach's insistence that he did. Caveat emptor, as they say.)

Long Beach on an Ascent

But it never left me, that looking down. Yes, it scared the daylights out of me -- an experience unwittingly echoed decades later in a much smaller aircraft banking steeply above the Inside Passage in Alaska (the pilot anted us to see the whales below) -- but it also excited me at the things you could see if you simply looked down. And so, all these years later, despite the tug of nervousness that sometimes nudges its way into my consciousness, I love the window seat.

Looking down, looking out, you understand what it is to be in motion, in flight, going somewhere -- doing something exciting. Breathtaking. 

As much as we complain that the airlines are rapidly becoming/have become little more than Trailways in the sky, from a window seat you can always sit back, lean your head against the window frame...

...and fly.

To Fly...