Flight.

31 people were killed and over 100 people were injured in an explosion at the busiest of Moscow’s airports today. Russian officials are calling it a terrorist attack.

Sigh. This really bothers me for a couple of reasons: I have family members that have flown through that airport on numerous occasions and people I love work for the airline industry. I am so tired of this perverted obsession with airplanes and airports. Like everyone else, I wish the terrorists would just stop it. My heart sinks whenever I hear of this sort of thing. I really think the human race has somehow shifted into reverse on the evolutionary PRNDL selection of gears.

I used to love to fly. There a few things more thrilling to me than getting into a two or four seat plane and soaring high above the earth. I used to find flying on a commercial flight to simply be a watered down experience of that thrill but now it’s become such a pain in the ass to fly that I have decided that I will drive to wherever I want to go unless there’s an ocean or something in the way. To me that’s very sad, but it’s reality. I hate the idiocy that has permeated the airline industry.

One of Alec Baldwin’s blog entries recently mentioned his thoughts on the airline industry and I found it to be most accurate. Referring to the airline industry after 9/11, Mr. Baldwin said this:

“The airlines were quick to take advantage of the new climate of security at the expense of all else. Whatever shreds of elegance were left in the US airline industry (most of it gone after the death of Pan Am) were yanked out and replaced with the public school bus system we fly on now.”

That really describes what flying is like now. Passengers are herded like cattle into a ridiculously minimal amount of space carrying obscene amounts of luggage, food and snacks to avoid any extra fees, with the hope that they won’t be left out on a Tarmac for five or more hours while the TSA tries to figure out the best way to blast passengers with an unhealthy amount of radiation for “security measures”. It’s a small wonder that more flight attendants aren’t popping open a beer and sliding down the emergency slide. The combination of security concerns, the declining sense of personal responsibility (especially with the passengers) and the lack of any sort of class with what was once a fairly classy venture has made the thought of getting onto an aircraft somewhat intolerable.

Now, I bitch about the state of the American airline industry because I don’t buy into the security theatre nor the corporate cutbacks of the airlines. No backscatter X-ray machine would have prevented the Moscow attack today.

This is sad, because as I said before, I like to soar. I wish others shared that feeling with me.

I grieve for those affected by the Moscow airport attack today. I hope I love long enough to see this kind of thing come to an end.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad