Sublime

The bird glides through space and nothing attaches to this spontaneous movement. No dots mark the sky with its flight path. The past does not appear in its immediate flight. The future remains unknown. All you ever see is this immediacy. It is life.

forget about the mechanics of flight & all the ways it could fail & I think about Lonnie in the sky, kept safe by his people & the small but useful things that outlasted their dreams JOHN GLENN, CAMBRIDGE, OHIO (1921–2016)

The trend away from a flight having one price toward a flight having multiple prices continued to spread, and by 1961 more people were flying coach than first class. But it wasn’t until 1978 that a major policy shift sent fares plunging: deregulation. After Congress passed the Airline Deregulation Act, the CAB was soon dissolved and airlines were f

Scheduled commercial flights, already a very low-risk activity at the end of the last century, got appreciably safer during the first two decades of the 21st century.