Unless you’re in first class, business, or were born with wings – flying sucks.
Even if you try to forget the obstacle course that is everything between check in and TSA to reaching your terminal and then wading through human carry-on luggage racks lining a smelly, crowded aisle of too-close seats, you still have to endure the actual flight. It’s cramped. The air’s recycled. The food has poop bugs in it. That little brat behind me won’t quit crying. And – above all – are we there yet???
That’s a question we might get to soon stop hectoring flight attendants with.
Like, as soon as around 2020-ish.
Because right now, a plane called SKYLON is in the works that will – when completed – be able to ferry you from Anywhere, Earth to Anywhere Else, Earth… in just four hours. Ever suffered through one of those nine hour flights? Come out the other end stuck in a permanent squat position? Maybe landed yourself a nice big leg blood clot? I haven’t. (Thank god.) But I know at least a handful of folk who have – and would cry tears of joy for a chance to make this thing their new mode of globe trotting transit.
(But wait! There’s more!)
If getting to Hong Kong from New York in less time than it takes to get from the same departure point to California isn’t enough – how about the fact that this thing also can go to mother effing outer space? I’m not talking special people from NASA getting to ride off in a shuttle. I mean, you and me (if you’re rich. And can foot the bill for our $435,000 a piece tickets) can taxi on a runway, take off, and Optimus Prime into a rocket once we’re up. Unfortunately, we can’t moon the commoners below as we head toward the moon – because this thing won’t have windows. What it will have is that panorama live screen technology I’ve written about before – the one they’re covering some regular planes with soon too.
Call me greedy or ungrateful or whatever but that does kinda ruin the whole thing for me.
Half of going to space for me would be so I can look whimsically out a window back at my watery rock home and recite Sagan inaccurately while I slosh around a glass of cranberry juice that floats up and hits me in the eye. Not see some Plato-cave digitized shadow version of it while sat in the darkened interior of a levitating metal tampon.
Unfortunately (much like the reason they’re implementing it into commercial planes) these screens serve a purpose I can’t deny is more financially feasible: they replace expensive, standard windows (expensive because it takes lotsa material to keep you from getting sucked out when you’re up high). Add the extra suckiness of outer-earth onto an aircraft, and the cost to ride on a f’real windowed shuttle plane would be pretty sucky itself. In fact, it’d make that $435,000 figure seem like the change you drop in the checkout line and don’t even bother picking up.
Conundrum for my cosmo fantasies? Yes.
But I can still totes use thing to tote me from here to Hawaii in a catnap’s time.
Not a bad consolation prize.