By the Seat of Technological Advancements

I mention my travels a lot. I hope my readers (both of them) don’t think I’m boasting or showing off when I do. It’s just the part of my life that seems to generate things to write about.

Today I returned home from an 8-day sojourn from Chicago to Lawrence, Kansas (3 days), to Montreal (5 days) and back to Chicago. I spent most of the flight with the window shade closed. Normally I prefer the aisle, but today’s flight was less than full, and I had the rare opportunity of an empty seat beside me. I had taken advantage of the window seat and the wall to lean against and sleep -- without having a body squeezing me in and hindering my exit -- while we sat out a delay on the tarmac, and then, during the flight, I had fired up my laptop and watched an episode of “The Sopranos” from the borrowed boxed set of season five.

During the final approach to O’Hare airport, with the laptop and related paraphernalia stowed, I opened my window shade and was surprised to find that we were right in the thickest part of a huge rain cloud, so thick that at points I could see wispy vapor partially obscuring the engine suspended beneath the wing. Water streamed across the outer surface of my window in a seemingly endless bundle of rivulets, spreading wide in an explosion of droplets when it hit the rearward edge of the window.

The thought occurred to me, the frequent driver of a car, that as unnerving as it is to drive in a fog so thick I can’t see the rear end of a car 15 feet in front of me, how is it for the pilot of a plane careening through space at 150 knots when there’s not enough time to even BLINK, let alone avoid a collision with something at that speed.

And then I heard and felt the landing gear deploy, and the thought ran through my mind as I looked out at the blank gray-white cocoon, “Well, I guess there’s a runway down there, somewhere.” And my mind was off.

I don’t claim to know much about the history of commercial aviation, nor of anything else, but one can make an educated stab at the progression and be pretty close…at least I hope I can! To keep this short, and to keep it from sounding like a history lesson, let’s just skip everything up to just past the point of the inventions of radar and radio navigation, and the world of advancement it meant to the field of aviation.

What would air travel be like today without the conveniences of radar and radio? What was it like back in the 1930s and ‘40s? Granted, we had radio communication back then, but what of radio navigation? Air traffic grids didn’t exist, then, and flight crews needed a navigator to study landmarks and geographical features, as well as relate them to a map, in order to get them to the right place. Everything was by sight and by the seat of the pants!

And then, probably back in the late ‘40s or early ‘50s, certainly when some genius thought to hook eight jet engines to an otherwise fairly anemic-looking plane with a wingspan greater than its length in order to reach the skies over the Soviet Union, some other genius realized there would have to be some sort of system to get a plane from point “A” to point “B” other than someone in the cockpit pointing out the window and saying, “I think it’s that way.”

I don’t know what they are or were called, but I know that there’s a massive grid of radio transmitters laid out across our nation and the globe, and that the world’s commercial and private pilots use this system to keep themselves on track to their destinations. So, no matter how bad the weather, how thick the clouds, the pilot has all the tools available to let him know he’s headed the right way. I guess the radar helps keep planes from crashing into each other.

So as I watched the water dribbling past my window, and the landing gear deployed, I knew that there was indeed a runway down there, somewhere, and that the slightly overweight, tall, balding guy locked away in that little room in the front of the plane knew right where it was, even though he couldn’t quite see it at the moment. I wondered what this flight would have been like without the technologies that had advanced and been perfected a lifetime ago, and it dawned on me that the flight probably would never have happened. It was a very docile weather system. There seemed to be no wind, no lightning, no torrents of rain. We punched through the bottom of the overcast at what I would guess was between 500 and 1,000 feet above the ground. Way back when, such a day would have grounded all flights out of O’Hare, and any pilot caught in the air in such a soup certainly would’ve needed a week at a nervous hospital, or at least a stiff drink, just to calm him down afterward.

But there I sat, my bored face stuck in the window, staring out at the boring clouds, so confident that the pilot knew the runway was there, as complacent with that belief as when I take my sock off that there’ll be five toes wiggling at me from the end of my foot.

And now I’m home, safe, and concerned only with important things. Things like the hopes that the Tigers will pull it out and clip the Cardinals’ wings. Things like being the closest to prayer I’ve been in over 25 years for the Bears to have a Super Bowl team this year. Things like hoping both of you have stuck it out and read my post this far, and not being pissed off at me because there’s no payoff.