In Taiwan this past weekend, 120 tourists boarded a passenger plane at Taipei’s Taoyuan airport and went on the briefest holiday in world history. Up they soared, some ten thousand feet into the immaculate morning air, gliding smoothly toward the South Korean island of Jeju, banking left and then — turning around and heading home.
The 1,000-kilometre excursion, hosted by Tigerair Taiwan, was one of a new wave of “scenic flights,” or “flights to nowhere,” conceived as a way to offer the much-yearned-for experience of travelling — or at least an approximation of it — while travel itself remains off limits.
Similar flights have appeared in Australia, Brunei and Japan, and to considerable success. A flight to and from Sydney next month went on sale this week. Tickets sold out in ten minutes.
Now there is a great deal I miss about the world as it was in the time before coronavirus, much of it unexpected, and indeed, some of it unpleasant: the restless, writhing crowds at the multiplex cinema, loudly gnawing on popcorn and whispering to one another inane remarks about the plot. The groaning sweaty sufferers at my local gym, tearing up valuable muscle mass in a cyclone of health-minded toil. And I am surprised to find I even miss the office.
The unprecedented emotional turmoil produced by a global pandemic, compounded by the alien abnormality of life under lockdown, has made us all nostalgic for mundane pleasures. We miss a lot. We miss the old ways.
But air travel ? That prosaic agony that is merely — and woefully — the price of going somewhere nice? Travelling by airplane, especially on any date after 9/11/2001, is an interminable chore of demoralizing tedium and bureaucratic humiliation — an exercise in standing around and lining up whose only reward is the forced invitation to sit down for several hours. The mild mind-torture of the customs questionnaire, the patience-sapping enmity of the security check-point, the drab queues before the departure gate and the coach aisle and the baggage claim: who seriously misses any of that?
I appreciate that it is not the destination but the journey that counts. But I think Emerson meant it figuratively — and he never had to deal with overhead bin space and carry-on bag requirements.
I will gladly suffer the boring indignity of flying across the Atlantic again as soon as it has been deemed reasonably safe to do so. Because then it will be worth the boredom: worth it to enjoy the thrill of another place. I can’t imagine how strange it must feel, stepping off the plane after several stupefying hours, only to see the same tarmac and terminal, the familiar domestic sky, exactly as you left them — like the movie In the Mouth of Madness , in which Sam Neill desperately attempts to flee a cursed town and just keeps winding up back there, again and again.
The vexing inconveniences of air travel are justified by the end result: Getting from point A to point B. Getting from A to A simply isn’t enough.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
