"On the Ground in 18 Minutes"

Thursday morning I was supposed to catch a 6:40 am plane to Rochester, NY (through Philadelphia, PA) to attend my friend Kelly’s wedding. I was to arrive in Rochester at 5pm, just in time for the rehearsal dinner. Turns out that just hours before I arrived at the airport, authorities arrested all those terror suspects in London and airport security was amped up across the world.

The security line at the San Diego airport was crazy. After an hour and a half in the line within the terminal, the line crossed the catwalk, went down the escalator, and spilled way into the parking lot before making a 180 turn and heading back into the building. The 3+ hour security wait forced me and about 50 others to miss my flight. Luckily I made it as a standby passenger onto an 11:45 am flight. Many other passengers weren’t so lucky. Still, even that flight ended up being delayed an additional 2 hours. I didn’t get into Rochester until midnight and I was exhausted. I missed the rehearsal dinner which upset me quite a bit. I haven’t seen Kelly or our friend Christy for more than three years and so I didn’t want to miss a minute.

I hate flying, even when things go smoothly. I used to be an ultra paranoid flyer, but nowadays, my aversion to air travel stems mostly from the fact that I’m prone to getting air sick. Nothing’s a bigger buzz kill than throwing up on a crowded, ill-ventilated plane surrounded by travel-weary strangers. The task of not throwing up requires intense mental focus. At the worst times I basically repeat “don’t throw up, don’t throw up” to myself over and over again while clenching my eyes shut and being careful to breathe exclusively through my nose. The rest of the time I have to keep my mind occupied with anything but the flight. I can’t read on the plane so most of the time my brain swims in circles and dances around with random thoughts.

On this flight, I became preoccupied with the pilot. The pilot doesn’t say much to the passengers on a flight. It’s mostly the flight attendants that do the talking. When the pilot’s voice comes on the intercom, I can’t help but anticipate that what he/she has to say is therefore of utmost importance and deserves my full attention. In that way, I suppose I liken the pilot to the Silent Bob character in the Kevin Smith movies. Anyway, on the leg of the flight from Philadelphia to Rochester, the pilot didn’t make his intercom debut until the end of the journey when he said “I hope you enjoyed your flight today. We’ll be on the ground in 18 minutes.”

The last part of his statement struck me to be a strange combination of calculated specificity, and disturbing vagueness. When most people want to describe a time frame in which something will occur, they give it in intervals. You tell your friends, for example, that you’ll be at the bar in 15 to 20 minutes. This simply wouldn’t cut it for a pilot. The passengers like to believe (and often need emphatic reassurance) that this air travel things is a perfect science and the pilot has everything worked out down the to the very last detail, in this case, the detail being an 18 minute window until arrival. The pilot’s specificity of exact arrival time subtly reassures the passengers that air travel is safe and reliable. However, the pilot of this flight (and many others, as I’ve heard this exact wording before) completely defeated the purpose of his time frame specificity with the vagueness of his “on the ground” vernacular. “On the ground” is a pretty vague statement to come from an airplane pilot and it could mean a number of different things. The plane could have landed safely on the runway, or could lay burning “on the ground” in any number of smouldering pieces. I think someone should bring this to pilots’ attention. It would put people (namely me) more at ease to hear the pilot say something like, “I hope you enjoyed your flight today. We will be landing in Rochester in 18 minutes.”