Ask the pilot

How confirmed airliner geeks express their terminal love of travel in a world of "destinations," but no borders.

By Patrick Smith

Sep 24, 2004 | "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."

-- Robert Louis Stevenson

Picking up from last week, we can add Turkey, Peru, Kyrgyzstan and Japan to Ask the Pilot's rapidly widening empire.

I reckon my overseas readership is a testament to one of two things: either the trans-border appeal of Salon.com's general content (in other words, Salon as the world's voyeur-portal for America's embarrassing political woes), or, perhaps more boringly, the internationalist appeal of civil aviation.

All airliner nuts, by rule and by nature, are internationalists. Check the postings some time on Airliners.net, with their little U.N.-style designators. That's the way life unfolds when, like I was, you're a seventh grader mesmerized by the routes and fleets of the world's airlines. Your infatuation carries you, almost literally, up and out of your country and into a huge, unaligned realm of "destinations." To the air-flight aficionado, Earth is a borderless place of stopovers and hubs, demarcated not by the fences of state and politics, but by the networks of the airlines.

To this day my favorite part of any airline timetable or in-flight magazine is the route map. Next time you fly, check out the back pages of the seat-pocket magazine. I could spend 90 minutes immersed in a kind of pilot porno, studying those three-panel foldouts and their exploding nests of arcs and lines.

Through the headlines of industry periodicals like Air Transport World, or in hobby mags like Airways, one learns geography as rapidly as aviation. Beneath the stats, graphs and aircraft data is a never-ending lecture on countries and capitals: Oman Air's new service from Katmandu to Muscat; PIA opens training center in Karachi; China Airlines crashes in Taipei. In the sixth grade I could have told you that Dhaka was the capital of Bangladesh -- for no greater reason than an article I'd read about Biman Bangladesh Airways.

In the life of an aero-apostle, one of two things happens. For some, the diagnosis of "airliner geek" becomes, to put it one way, terminal. The world beneath those lines remains forever an abstraction, countries and cultures irrelevant beyond the airport perimeter.

For others, there's a point when those cities and countries become real. The goal, suddenly, isn't just the airplane, but the place it happens to be flying to; the full and beautiful integration of flight and travel, travel and flight.

Two years ago I traveled to India. Why? Because I grew up with a thing for curry or an obsession with ancient Sanskrit? No; because I grew up with a thing for the Boeing 747. The Boeing 747 became Air India. Air India became a line on a route map between New York and Delhi. Delhi became India. India became a place I wanted to see.

If ever this struck me in a moment of clarity, it was in November 2002 on the tarmac in Bamako, Mali. You might remember my trip to Mali, and my pinasse voyage up the Niger River to Timbuktu. Though I could write for pages about the wonders and strangeness of West Africa, one of the trip's most vivid and memorable moments took place at the airport -- the arrival scene as our plane touched down in Bamako from Paris.

Deplaning from the Air France A330 at midnight, two hundred of us descended the drive-up stairs into the murky, rust-colored mist. We were paraded solemnly around the perimeter of the aircraft, moving aft in a wide semicircle toward the arrivals lounge. There was something ceremonial and ritualistic about it. We were, in a way, saying farewell. Farewell to civilization, at least as we'd left it in Paris.

The final touchstone was passing beneath the soaring, blue-and-white tail of Air France, the plane's auxiliary turbine screaming into the night air. Through the glass doors we passed, digging out our visas and that yellow-fever vaccination card, and into the cauldron of West Africa. It was all so, to use that word so politically incorrect, exotic. And the airplane was the centerpiece. I felt like an explorer whose sailing ship had landed on some strange, undiscovered continent.

Next Page: I write not just to inform, but to inspire!

• View blog reactions