Turbulence

There are many unpleasant but almost guaranteed aspects of modern air travel, and comedians working in the golden age of the 1980s have done a pretty thorough job of examining almost all of them. Airport security. The peanuts. The weird stewardess subculture. The pilot's narration. The sweaty fat guy in the seat next to you.

Most of us could do a reasonable approximation of the routine from memory — airline humor is, in fact, a recognizable cultural signpost, itself ripe for mockery. "Family Guy," to cite one example, did an episode involving air travel in its 3rd season. Displaying the self-loathing schizophrenia that has made it one of the most legitimately funny TV shows in recent years, it spent half of its firepower mocking air travel — and the other half mocking the deeply cliched way that comedians mock air travel.

Turbulence, however, isn't really very funny.

Getting in an airliner is doable only because it seems so huge, so firm, so permanent — it's the kind of massively reliable thing you and hundreds of other people should, and do, trust. It's "safer than driving." It really is. But it's hard to repeat that bromide and really feel it when your plane is shaking like a can of paint in a mixing machine.

More than being distracting and spilling your free can of soda pop, turbulence is also a powerful existential reminder that you're doing something absolutely and thoroughly unnatural: you're flying very high up in the air in the belly of a giant metal bird powered by exceedingly flammable fuel.

And although we are apparently modern and rational people, this is exactly sort of hubris that Zeus, or Odin, or Yahweh — pretty much any old, cranky patriarch god — absolutely hates. It's like stealing the first lick of fire, or building the Tower of Babel, or taking a whiz in a baptismal font. It cheeses off the patriarch god.

And when the patriarch god is pissed off, people die.

We know that. We still have a small, partially walled-off part of our brain that responds to this kind of primal superstitious fear in a really passionate way.

The hubris of flight means that anything — a change in engine pitch, a too-sudden shift to a new altitude, perceived nervousness in the captain's voice — can be read as a harbinger of near-instant, somewhat deserved and absolutely certain death.

Turbulence isn't a subtle sign; it practically beats you over the head with grave implications. Despite its completely routine nature, when it strikes couples hold hands without shame, and lone travelers' thoughts flash almost instantaneously to their loved ones.

It's the beginning of the end, the thunder before the final stroke of lightning.

Except it isn't. It's just what happens when you pilot a plane from point A to point B; it's no more unusual than hitting a gravel patch on a county highway.

But until humanity has evolved so completely from its primitive roots that it no longer views the world in stark, magical terms during moments of stress, turbulence will always feel just a little more serious than a mere air pocket.

It's always going to sound just a little bit like God clearing His throat.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)