Thursday, January 24, 2008

Airliners I Have Known & Loved

I like airliners.

I don’t know why. (Feel free to advance a Freudian theory.) Thanks to all the post-9/11 security nonsense and the general mismanagement of the airline industry I don’t particularly enjoy flying anymore, but I still love airliners.

When I was a young teen, I used to ride the bus out to the Portland Airport just to hang out and watch planes. (That was back in the day when you could get to the gates without a ticket and you didn’t have to take off your shoes and belt.) PDX in the ‘80s wasn’t super exciting, unless you had a thing for 737’s, 727’s and MD80’s. Me, I preferred the big ones. (Again, Freudian?) There was a TWA L1011 that flew daily to JFK via Seattle, but it was a redeye and was only seen at Portland late at night; likewise the old Hawaiian L1011s came in at night and left at dawn. When Eastern went belly-up there was an A300B stuck out on the tarmac for weeks. So life at PDX was pretty dull, until Delta started up a mini Asian hub with nonstops to Tokyo, Nagoya and Seoul using L1011-500’s. (The latter flight continued on to Taipei and Bangkok.)

See, I know where these planes went because I also collected timetables. I actually read them. Yes, I would sit and read timetables. Like, more than once. I read them so much that when updates came out, I would notice things, like, Continental reduced its daily flights from Wichita to Houston. So even though the planes from Portland didn’t go anywhere interesting, I loved poring over TWA’s flights to Europe or Eastern’s to South America or United’s to Asia. I had a particular passion for Continental’s Pacific routes; it was some weird thrill to know when the flight from Yap to Truk was. When Delta took over PanAm’s European routes and started flying to random places like Dubrovnik, I about had a heart-attack from excitement.

My collection, of course, was limited to tables I could pick up at boring old PDX, just the big American carriers. But one day, flipping through the yellow pages (this is how we surfed the internet in the 1980s) and looking at the airline ads, I had the brilliant realization that the yellow pages from a bigger city would have more ads. And the Multnomah County Library had the New York City phonebook. So I went downtown and wrote down the 800 numbers for all the foreign airline offices in New York and called and requested timetables. What must my parents have thought when schedules for Air Afrique and Cathay Pacific started coming in the mail? Screw Wichita; now I could memorize the available routes from Geneva to Islamabad.

I about hyperventilated anytime I got to actually travel through a big airport. In 1990, when my high school marching band went to Hawaii for a competition, I took off on my free time…and went back to the airport. That was where I saw my first real-live 747-400 (Singapore Airlines to Los Angeles via Taipei). While I was still orgasming over this milestone sighting, a second one pulled in right next to it, from Malaysia Airlines. That summer I traveled to Japan as an exchange student and about died at Narita; yeah, that was 18 years ago now, but I still remember seeing an Iran Air 747-SP and an Aeroflot IL-62, among others. Most people don’t remember (because they don’t care) the kind of plane they just disembarked from, let alone a plane they didn’t ride on two decades earlier.

JFK, of course, has an amazing variety of airliners, but the terminals are lousy for plane spotting. My favorite was Zurich; the airport has an open-air observation deck on the roof of one of the concourses, which puts you at right about cockpit-level on a 747. I was so homesick there that I used to stare at the New York-bound Delta 767-300’s with a seriously intense longing, as I huffed the fumes. Good stuff.

Wish there was a way to make money with this.

8 comments:

Gino said...

on the west side of LAX, there was a nieghborhood of homes, right near the ocean, torn down to make way for LAX expansion in the 70's.
the nieghborhood was still there, minus the houses, just residential streets among empty lots, back in the late 80's.
these homes had to go because they were directly under the flight path of landings and take-offs.
i mean real directly, like maybe less than 100-200 ft.

as a teen, we would park on these streets and watch the jets go back and forth, so close it made your hair stand on end. (almost scary)

maybe i'll googleearth that spot.

Gino said...

yeah, its still there, in great detail just as as i remember it, although it looks like they've closed off many of the old streets.

it was a 'happening' late nite spot to bring beer and dates as well.

Anonymous said...

(Feel free to advance a Freudian theory.)

Of course, you know this as evidenced by your skillful analogies and clever wordsmithery (orgasming, nonstops, riding, hyperventilating, passion, thrill, cockpit, and screw Wichita) but ....

"To a Freudian psychologist, an airplane is a phallic symbol by virtue of its forceful, penetrative motion." Craig Hamilton-Parker

Going to airports to see planes was a manifestation of your phallocentrism. Your preoccupation with the phallic was evident in your reading timetables when the forceful, penetrators of the sky would take off. Prepubscently, you were an observer instead of actively riding phalli. Your fascination with foreign inward and outward bound planes reveals not only your unfamiliarity with the thrusting nature of phalli but also your desire to discover the new. Your passion for "the big ones" is evident in the phallic symbols you preferred.

Best.

DJRainDog said...

Andy: There IS a way to make money on this. Actually, there are several. You could become an air-traffic controller (though this is HIGHLY stressful) or go to flight school and become a pilot. (I bet you'd look cute in the uniform, and as a bonus, I who have difficulty flying without the assistance of 2 xanax, a percocet, and a half-bottle of shiraz, might be more comfortable knowing that I know the guy in the cockpit. ;-) )

Andy said...

DJ, I actually make more $ now than a lot of pilots and no, there's no way I could handle the stress.

Terri said...

I absolutely love your love of airliners! My grandpa lives in OR and he still likes to go to the airport to watch the planes and the people. I think you guys would really get along :)

Anonymous said...

I remember your odd but interesting airplane fixation. It did make rather more sense after I found out you were gay ;)! lu!

Anonymous said...

Ha ha! I love this article. It's so good that you're so passionate about something. It's also a great read. Thank you for brightening up my evening :)