Turbulence
And we’re all just passengers tonight
And we’re all just traveling through our lives
We will reach our destination
So just hang on for the ride
Say a prayer and close your eyes
It’s just a little turbulence.
~ Bowling For Soup
Cheryl sat next to me frantically fanning herself in the window seat, 29E, on Delta flight 804, CLE to ATL on Friday, December 28th, 2018. She kept her window shade pulled down. Foreboding clouds an unreliable reference, but I prefer seeing them anyway. I sat in the aisle seat listening to music through headphones, trying to read. The plane bounced around pretty good on its descent. A healthy storm front had swept across the eastern US. Cheryl claimed the pilot gave no warning and I was oblivious.
To deal with the motion, the bumpy ride, you’re supposed to imagine a rollercoaster ride. At the amusement park, you pay good money for the thrill of acceleration. Why not enjoy the fun, courtesy of Delta?
Has anyone ever accepted this? If it were that fun, the airline industry would charge a fee, changing course hundreds of miles to provide passengers the supposed universal thrill of jouncing through inclement weather.
No one enjoys turbulence. Some are better at psychologically dealing. Out of the corner of my eye, I take comfort in the experienced, calm travelers placidly turning a page or sipping a cocktail, and I mimic best I can. I keep my head down although I’m reading the same sentence over again. I reflect on all the flights I’ve heard or read about that have met their demise due to turbulence on approach: zero. I think about the physics, the normal force, how it changes, unexpectedly, unpredictably; a dance whose secret steps exist between aluminum tube and gusting wind, engine thrust and pressure gradient. The normal force is just the seat pushing upward on your bottom. We’re made aware of only when it changes. When the normal force increases, we feel heavy; it drops away, we feel light.
I think about relative motion. Unbelted flight attendants caught in the aisle suddenly fly up to crack their heads on the cabin ceiling – it’s actually the airplane dropping while the unbelted stay in place. Inertia.
On a rollercoaster, there’s a point of contact, the steel rail in view, just ahead, anticipatable.
It’s safe to say the baby, a girl, age seven months or so, being held by her father and looking back at me from one row up, across the aisle, had never been on a rollercoaster before. This may have been the baby’s maiden flight. She gave away no tells, although, in hindsight, I thought I saw a look of contentment under her wispy blonde locks, a well-fed, happy tummy look.
Airplanes can roll, pitch, and yaw, which is to say, they tip every which way. The engine’s ominous revving reminds me the plane can move three additional ways, translationally. The wonderful feeling of six degrees of freedom at work, riding the storm out.
The disconnect between the motion you see and the motion you feel overwhelms your senses and makes you dizzy.
Another baby, or young child, in the last row of the plane maybe eight rows behind us screamed like a banshee. The banshee, you’ll remember, were flying creatures, those colorful winged pterodactyls the Na’vi rode in the movie Avatar. The key to harnessing the flight power of the banshee was to neurally connect with the creatures by braiding your hair with their tails. I knew Cheryl’s nerves were frayed when she kept looking to the rear of the plane to witness the blood-curdling source and said, “That scream cannot be coming from a human.” Cheryl told me later that one of two children seated right behind us asked their father across the aisle in a preternaturally calm voice, as if she’d received penance for the sin of coveting her sibling’s toys, “Daddy, are we going to die?”
I didn’t hear a thing, listening to the recently departed (RIP) Lemmy Kilmister overwhelm my vestibular system with his gravelly growl, delivered like an ice pick to my auditory canal, courtesy of Bose, singing Motorhead’s version of Chuck Berry’s Run Run Rudolph. A line in the song goes, “Then away went Rudolph, whizzing like a Saber jet” referencing, I believe, the North American F-86 Sabre, sometimes called the Sabre-jet, the first ‘swept wing’ jet fighter employed by the U.S. in the Korean War (1950-1953). Makes sense as Chuck Berry’s version was released in 1958. The swept wing was unique for angling backward from the body of the plane rather than at ninety degrees. The swept wing reduced air drag and improved dog fighting maneuvers.
I offered my precious headphones to Cheryl. She listened for awhile but Stevie Nicks rasping Silent Night only seemed to exacerbate her misery.
Two purple-clad flight attendants, one tall, one short, on top of each other, haltingly walked, the tall one practically pushing the short one, either by training or just frantic, I’m not certain. They clasped the headrests to steady themselves on their tandem wobble to the rear. The shorter attendant had her own issues, but the taller took one look at Cheryl on passing and said, “Oh Dear God, grab your bag already,” in a tone that suggested Cheryl was acting childish, or worse, over-acting like a child, think Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.
Weeks ago, Cheryl and I watched The Christmas Chronicles on Netflix, a movie in which a pair of siblings accidentally crash Santa’s sleigh. The sleigh was equipped with a glowing control to show percent Christmas spirit, ebbing worldwide as the siblings teamed with Santa on a quest to repair the sleigh and save Christmas. Kurt Russell played Santa and you could tell he enjoyed over-acting his role. A slim Santa who absolutely does not do ‘Ho-Ho-Ho’. One night during our holiday stay with my mom, we watched Smokey and the Bandit. Burt Reynolds and Sally Field played it understated, cool and hot, respectively, but Jackie Gleason, as Sheriff Buford T. Justice, gloriously over-acted. Eye-bulging, spitting proclamations of stature, “Boy, do you know who I am? I – am – Sheriff – Buford – T – Justice – of – Texas!” stole the show.
Too short a flight for a movie, I chanced a look, saw Cheryl’s eyes squeezed shut, lower lip trembling, like she was trapped in a nightmare unable to wake.
“Eric,” Cheryl said, nails digging into my wrist, driving her head back into the headrest, “get me off this plane.”
There are lines on OK Go’s song, Upside Down & Inside Out, that go, “Don’t know where your eyes are, but they’re not doin’ what you said. Don’t know where your mind is baby, but you’re better off without it.” The video for this song was filmed on a Zero-G flight.
I reached into the pouch on the seat-back and found the barf bag. I puffed it open and comforted Cheryl by saying, “Here. Take it.” And then I noticed the baby across the aisle, staring. The baby’s contented look was replaced by another, more dangerous look.
The Vomit Comet is the nickname for a jet ride (a modified Boeing 727) you can take to simulate weightlessness. The ride is offered by a company called Zero-G who promise you will float like an astronaut and fly like a superhero. The plane follows a parabolic trajectory, the same as a projectile in free fall. As passenger, you’ll free fall along with the plane for 20 to 30 seconds. For the privilege of fifteen of these half-minute parabolic maneuvers, you pay $4950 plus 5% tax.
Martha Stewart and Stephen Hawking are quoted on the webpage, both using ‘amazing’ to describe the experience. I found an interview with a Zero-G pilot who said, “I don’t really keep any stats, but it amounts to a rule of thirds – one-third violently ill, the next third moderately ill, and the final third not ill at all.”
I failed to anticipate the violently ill third which included my wife, and now the baby who blew a pale yellow stream of baby chunks into her father’s face. He turned his head and held the baby at arms’ length. Mom pressed the call button but of course no attendant was unbelting. The plane’s still bouncing, the baby’s got a poker face, and a dribble of partially digested goo on her chin. To my left, the man across the aisle, directly behind the baby, was wiping his shirt and pants with a wet nap. I looked over at Cheryl. I did not share the scene.
Motion simulators can duplicate six ways to move (six degrees of freedom) using three pairs of hydraulic actuators sandwiched between motion platforms in an arrangement called a hexapod. Motion simulators are either occupant-controlled (like flight simulators used to train pilots and astronauts and teen drivers) or passive-rider (like theme park rides).
An airplane can rotate three ways: yaw, pitch, and roll. Cars, for the most part, are not free to rotate like planes, but the black Firebird Trans Am that Burt Reynolds’ Bandit drove sure did. Every spin-out was a yaw, and the jump, nose up across the incomplete bridge, nose down onto the football field was a pitch. Sally Field’s character gyrating out of her wedding gown while in the passenger seat caused the Trans Am to roll as did the scene (presumably, as it was left to the imagination) where Bandit finally removed his cowboy hat, leaving it perched and rocking atop the radio antennae.
There are straight-line equivalents to rotation’s yaw, pitch, and roll. They have interesting technical names: sway, surge, and heave.
The baby kept it together and so did Cheryl, neither surging nor heaving the rest of the flight. Although it did take Cheryl several hours of not swaying at home alone in bed to fully regain 100% Christmas spirit.