That is what makes the policy of Delta Airlines so shockingly un-American.  In Austin, Delta had not one but two lines that fed into the Transportation Security Administration checkpoint area. One line was mixed race, mixed class and mixed age. The other line was usually empty. Now and then a white, middle-aged man would appear in the second line and the first line would be halted as he went directly into the TSA checkpoint.

“Who are those guys?” I asked a TSA officer, when I reached the front of the second-class citizen line.

“Delta has total control over the passenger line all the way up to here,” the officer answered. “They’ve decided to let priority passengers as well as pilots and steward staff go through ahead of others.”

“So that’s the rich white guy line?” I asked.

The TSA officer laughed. “On our side of the line, everybody is equal.”

Now I would be the first to concede that what Delta and other airlines do beyond the government security checkpoint at the gates that lead to airplanes is their business. At the moment, the model of America’s pathetic, predatory, deteriorating airline industry seems to be eking out nickels and dimes by playing crudely on the snobbery of their customers, with the use of two separate lines at the terminal gates, one for priority passengers — labelled, by various airlines, Gold, Platinum, Elite and so on.

The priority line, needless to say, goes to exactly the same door and entry ramp and does not get the “elite” to its destination one second earlier. Neither de Toqueville, who commented on the contrast between the status obsessions of Americans and their professed democratic egalitarianism, nor Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption,” would have been surprised by this method of showing off. Such silliness is a matter for satire, not lawsuits or protest marches.

But going through airline security is different. It is not a choice, like belonging to an airline’s frequent flier points club. Security screening is an onerous civic duty. Like other civic duties, it should be shared equally by rich and poor alike. Remember the motto of Jacksonian populism? “Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.”

Nearly all the airlines now allow well-heeled passengers to pay for the privilege of cutting ahead of the rest of us at the TSA checkpoint. At many airline checkpoints there are two lines. The long line looks like America; the short line is made up mostly of affluent white men.

Is this the future we Americans want: two lines at all airline security checkpoints, one for the privileged 1 percent and the other for the 99 percent, who have to stand aside to let the people with lots of money pass?  Alas, it appears that making economic apartheid formal in U.S. civil aviation is a bad idea whose time has come. The TSA is experimenting with a “precheck” program with built-in class discrimination, including the government’s crony-capitalist invitation of frequent fliers from private U.S. airline programs, but not other American citizens, to participate:

If you are a United States citizen and are currently a member of CBP’s eligible Trusted Traveler programs (Global Entry, SENTRI, NEXUS), you are automatically qualified to participate in the TSA Pre ™ pilot as long as you are flying on a participating airline at a participating airport. (If you’re a more frequent flyer with Delta or American, you must opt in to the program by responding to the communication sent to you, which is why it’s important to find that email and follow the directions in it.)

In other words, if you do not fly frequently — and most low-income and middle-income Americans cannot afford to — you would not be allowed to take part in this public government program.  In true crony capitalist fashion, the precheck program blurs the line between the government’s security function and the airlines’ purely commercial frequent flier programs.

The precheck program is advertised as an experimental program, holding out the possibility that after a period in which they are subject to more scrutiny than affluent business travelers, low-income grandmothers traveling to visit their grandchildren at last will be able to take part.  More likely, the precheck program would never be extended to the masses rather than the classes.  It would simply become another permanent perk of the elite, whose members would have no incentive to lobby for democratizing the program — rather the contrary.

But wouldn’t it help an overburdened airport security system to reduce the number of people to be rigorously screened by TSA?  Not if it means more screening for low-income grandmothers and less for frequent business travelers.  Indeed, as anti-terrorist measures, trusted traveler programs allowing affluent people who are frequent international travelers to be subjected to fewer security procedures might well backfire. Osama bin Laden and Mohamad Atta were members of the affluent social and educational elites in their countries who lived abroad and traveled frequently.

These “trusted traveler” systems will not make America safer. Their unacknowledged purpose is to create yet another area of American society that is privatized and segregated by class, to the benefit of the mostly white economic overclass.

Very well then. Why don’t we just make the new class-based discrimination official? Instead of leaving it to airlines and other corporations to construct the new apartheid piecemeal and informally, let the government issue a Premium Elite Citizen Card, valid for multiple purposes. For the right price, a price carefully calculated to be unaffordable by the majority of Americans, those willing and able to pay would be allowed to cut in line, not only at airports, but everywhere: at taxi stands, movie theaters, restaurants. All they would have to do is flash their Premium Elite Citizen Card to force the rabble to step aside and make way.  The degeneration of America’s democracy into a banana republic would be complete, once the Land of the Free became the Land of the Free Points With Membership.

I’ll admit that I was initially stunned to see how apparently commonplace the practice is. I’d never given my two daughters Benadryl or anything else to calm them down when they were young travelers, and the thought of doing so seemed wrong to me. It would have felt like a violation of their trust, a willful introduction of something unnecessary into their bodies for my own convenience.

In fairness, though, my kids have barely ever flown, and when they have, they’ve been reasonably chill. And after getting an earful from other parents both on Twitter and via email, I began to wonder if doing something that could make a child comfortable — and one’s fellow travelers considerably less inconvenienced – was such a big deal.

“I’ve totally given Benadryl as a way to get the kids to go to sleep when they were littler,” says my friend Collette, whose sons are now tweens like mine. “I think I did it about a month ago even. I would do it on a flight if I thought it would make them less freaked out.” But, she admits, “I’ve never made it a habit.”

And my friend Ted, who has two school-age daughters, regaled me with the story of flying to Florida a few years ago, “crouched down behind the row of seats in the departure lounge, feeding my perfectly healthy kids cough syrup so they will sleep, and looking guiltily around to see if I am going to be caught. Down at the other end of the long row of benches, I catch the eye of another parent doing the same thing to her daughter. All our kids rack out and we sit and laugh about it — and other kid realities — for the whole flight.”

It’s not as if this generation’s parents invented the idea of taking the edge off for our kids. We learned from the masters – our own parents. Ted says, “My parents did the same to us when we were on long road trips. We had a VW van with the back seat removed and a platform put in covered with mattresses and sleeping bags and we drove everywhere — out to the Midwest, down to Florida, New Mexico. My mother fed the three of us cough meds as we left a few times and after that it was Pavlovian — we’d all get in the car and immediately crash. I still fall asleep if I’m not driving.” Collette says that her mother used to give her whiskey in hot milk. And Monica, a mom in the Bay Area, recalls a cross-country trip with her brothers in the ’70s, when the kids “made little beds in the back of my parent’s Buick LaSabre and slept constantly.”

“It was strange to wake up and two states had gone by, or it was afternoon and suddenly it was midnight and we were checking into a hotel,” she says. “My mom was always giving us ‘vitamins’ from a tincture. I remember us all standing in the entry of our hotel room while she gave us little drops — like little birds getting a worm. Years later my mom told me what she did. She had gone to the doctor before the trip and gotten some kind of sleep aid/tranquilizer for us.”

But nothing in life, not even relaxing, over-the-counter allergy medication, is a sure thing, recalls Melissa, a mom who learned that the hard way. “We gave our newly adopted 14-month-old a dose on a flight home from China. She wound up climbing the walls, hyper-awake and restless. Never touched the stuff again.”

And Darshak Sanghavi, a pediatrician and author of “A Map of the Child: A Pediatrician’s Tour of the Body,” says, “According to a good randomized trial of Benadryl to promote sleep in infants, the drug didn’t really work any better than a placebo. So I first tell parents that it’s not really clear that Benadryl really works like many parents might think. Second, there are occasional case reports of Benadryl poisoning. Granted, those are highly unlikely, but my opinion is that parents traveling with infants should generally stay away from trying to sedate them with Benadryl, and instead focus on comforting them with feeding during takeoff and landing (may improve ear pressure equalization). Flying with infants is almost always torture,” he admits, “and unfortunately, medicating an infant isn’t going to change that.”

Yet when you’re facing a cross-country flight and a cranky kid, sometimes you’re willing to try anything. My own former pediatrician, Brooklyn’s Dr. Philippa Gordon, advises parents to be guided by equal measures of caution and instinct. “It’s a question that toggles between the pragmatic and what we find uncomfortable,” she says. “Is it a kid who has a known disorder or you know is going to have a terrible time on a flight? Or is it really more for the control of their symptoms than the comfort of other passengers? Are you medicating them for behaving like normal, developmentally appropriate children? We shouldn’t use medications just for the comfort of adults. Remember that Benadryl is an antihistamine. I try not to use over-the-counter drugs for children and toddlers, and certainly not for unintended results.” But she adds that it’s “a judgment call,” and ultimately “a relatively benign intervention.”

But my friend Helen, an advanced practice nurse specializing in maternal addiction in Philadelphia, sees it differently. “I think putting a chemical into your child’s brain in lieu of substituting appropriate comforting parenting behaviors is shameful,” she says. “Whatever happened to games, singing, soothing? I work with addicts for a living and this is the disease to its core: Can’t cope? Head for the dope! If other people on the plane get annoyed at a fussy child, then dose THEM.”

Even those of us who’ve never sedated our kids can cop to moments when we’ve considering it. I’ve certainly enjoyed a few of my children’s drowsier afternoons after they’ve had vaccinations or medication. And my friend Ava recalls a pediatrician handing her two bottles of medicine, “with instructions to be careful to give the one at night, as it would make my 8-month-old baby sleepy,” and wondering, “Just at night? When I’ve considered the tension and fighting and probable bad mothering that took place in a carful of kids on a 12-hour road trip, I’ve wondered more than once just how bad it would have been if I’d given them that night-time cold medicine. I didn’t, but I wouldn’t judge a mother who did.”

I’m still glad I got out of my children’s meltdown years without dosing them – because that feels like the right and consistent approach for our family. I still shudder at the automatic “Haven’t you ever heard of Benadryl?” response from callous adults who think any child out in public should be silent and sleepy. There’s also a world of difference when you’re dealing with a colicky baby, a tantrum-tossing toddler or a bored kindergartner, and you need to consider your options in age-appropriate ways. But in the past few days, I’ve been reminded that parenting is very much a make-it-up-as-we-go-along adventure, and that most of us really are endeavoring to do right by our children and the innocent bystanders who have to put up with them. As my writer-friend Stella says, “There are so many things you say you’ll never do/say to your kids. But any parent will tell you that raising children is all about doing the best you can with what’s at hand. Excepting actual physical injury or emotional trauma, I would never deign to judge the parental decisions someone else makes. Parenting is hard. Full stop. And you do what you can.”

The problem, the family says, arose when Natalie – and apparently her sister as well — didn’t appreciate the notion of sitting still and being buckled in. Natalie wanted to fly on her mother’s lap, but federal regulations require children over the age of 2 to fly in their own seats. “We were holding them down with all of our might, seat belt on,” their mother, Dr. Colette Vieau, told a Rhode Island TV station this week. “And I said, ‘We have them seated. Can we go now?’” Instead, the pilot made the decision to ground the  family and have them escorted off the flight. They wound up having to book a hotel for the night and then find another flight home, to the tune of $2,000.

The very fact that Dr. Vieau describes the scene with the phrase having to use “all of our might” certainly suggests that little Natalie might be a handful. And her squirmtastic appearance on the “Today” show Monday doesn’t do much to suggest she’d have settled down for a peaceful ride back to Boston. So it’s unsurprising that when “Today” polled its viewers, “71 percent of more than 60,000 voters” agreed with the airline’s decision to kick the family off the flight.

Modern flying is horrible enough – on top of all the usual indignities, nobody wants to be trapped in the air with a pair of freaked-out toddlers. This mortified family, however, just wanted to get home, and they remain confused about just how quickly the incident escalated. As Dr. Vieau says, “We did what we were asked to do. We weren’t belligerent, drunk, angry or screaming. We were just having a hard time struggling with our children. Just some consideration, a little bit of humanity in the situation was really all I was looking for.”

What stories like this illustrate is how often that “little bit of humanity” goes wanting. And the predictably vocal response shows how badly we’ve all been burned by other people’s senses of entitlement. For their part, the Vieaus — with their Caribbean vacation, their plea that they’ve flown with their very young brood an impressive 15 times before, and their sob story of having to lay out two grand for an extra night on a tropical island — come off sounding exactly like the kind of spoiled, swaggering parents who make you avoid the playground. They may be lovely people whose kid had an off day – and if you’re a parent, you’ve likely seen plenty of those – but their story can’t engender too much sympathy. Too many of us have endured the nightmare of the family that just does not understand why little Finnegan’s meltdown is not what everyone in earshot signed up for. We’ve all seen preschoolers gone wild and parents who blithely stood by. When we hear a story about a toddler freaking out, we immediately think, fairly or not, “Spoiled parents, spoiled kids.”

That’s why the story is hard from the other side, too. Sometimes all a family has to do is go somewhere other than a Chuck E. Cheese to rile up a whole lot of tantrums – and not from the 2-year olds. You need only look as far as the frothing comments about “yuppie larvae” with “unbearable brats,” and observations that “kids just suck up oxygen and subway space anyways” to see that there’s a whole mess of preemptive rage toward children and families. And even if a child is tantruming up a storm, it’s still a stretch for an airline to claim, as the Vieaus assert, that she was “a risk to the safety and security of the aircraft in general.”

We all have to navigate a pretty crowded planet together. As Dr. Vieau herself admits, “I don’t know that I could blame JetBlue, to be totally fair. I just feel like it’s airplane travel today in general.” Kids don’t make it easy – they are volatile, difficult and often really annoying beings, it’s true. But they can’t stay home until they learn not to scream and poop in their pants. Sometimes they have to travel for family reasons, and frankly, they’re entitled to for recreational ones. They’re people, and as such, they can be jerks just like everybody else. A parent doesn’t always know, on the morning of a flight, whether she’s going to get Quiet Little Napping Girl or Hellspawn Baby for the day. The best all of us can do with other people’s kids is not be hostile just because they’re kids. And the best we can do as parents is to know when to exit gracefully.

And here’s another one: the ever-expanding collection of electronic cords, adapters, chargers and gadgets I’m obliged to haul around with me. You know what I’m talking about. Anybody who travels regularly knows what I’m talking about. All of this, supposedly, to keep us “connected.” To make our lives easier and more productive.

Does it?

Don’t get me wrong. Riding the subway out to Logan, I love being able to pop in my earbuds and catch a few cuts from the Wedding Present, the Jazz Butcher or the Velvet Underground. And my MacBook Air is as essential for travel as a change of socks. But there is, or was, something to be said for that unplugged, disconnected age of not so long ago. If nothing else, our carry-ons were lighter, with more room for clothes.

The photo above shows the assortment of electronic gadget and gizmos I take with me pretty much every time I hit the road, be it for work or pleasure. As recently as a decade ago I owned none of this. I didn’t even have a cellphone until 2006.

Clockwise-ish, from upper left:

– That black case contains the camera that I used to take this picture. I currently use a Panasonic DMC-LX3. It’s a decent point-and-shoot with a Leica lens and super-long battery life. (The more recent pictures in my Flickr archives were taken with this camera.) I bring it with me on most, though not all, of my layovers and holidays.

– Earbuds. I recently upgraded to a pair of Klipsch and retired this Apple set.

– 32GB flash drive. For my backup files, and for transferring to and from my “master” computer at home.

– USB connector for camera (optional).

– Ethernet cord. Useful in those (too many) hotels where Wi-Fi is weak and a wired connection runs more robustly. Hotel-supplied Ethernet cords are often broken.

– Power adapter for laptop.

– AC adapter set. Essential when traveling overseas. One problem is, if I’m assigned to reserve status I often don’t know if I’ll be heading overseas until the last minute, so I’ve always got this with me.

– iPhone 4. Product unplug: Am I the only person who despises — and I mean really despises — the iPhone’s messaging keypad? Because the special function keys — caps, space bar, backspace and return — are so close to the normal character keys, I’m constantly capitalizing, spacing and backspacing when I don’t mean to. This happens in either the vertical or horizontal layout, and it’s especially annoying for those of us with fat fingers. It takes me five attempts to complete the simplest sentence.

– USB charger for iPhone.

– USB-to-AC connector thing for iPhone (optional, but a good thing to have).

– USB-to-Ethernet adapter (see Ethernet cord above).

And, in the middle of it all, my beloved MacBook Air.

All together, we’re looking at roughly five pounds of technology that, for all intents and purposes, is mandatory carry-on. Sometimes it’s slightly less, other times slightly more. Not shown, for instance, is my Flip video camera, which I bring on longer trips. ( Flip brought you this, among other works of directorial art.)

Thus the real must-have gadget is a decent case or container in which to consolidate all of this crap. For me, most of the more wiry components above fit nicely into an old business class amenities kit, which keeps them out of the way and avoids tangles. (How frustrating is it, meanwhile, that so many electronic devices require their own proprietary charging cord or adapter? Imagine if every lamp took a different kind of light bulb.)

The amenities case, together with the laptop, camera and phone, fit snugly into either of my larger carry-ons. Now that my flight case has been retired — a milestone previously detailed here — I typically go to work with two pieces of luggage:

The first is a custom crew roll-aboard from Luggage Works. At the moment I use the 26-inch LW with the plastic frame, which is much lighter than the more popular metal frame version. To make it even lighter, I’ve retrofitted the stainless steel retractable handle with an aluminum one.

I don’t know what “custom crew” means. I just thought it sounded cool. Over 95 percent of LW users are airline crew members, but anybody can order one.

A number of my colleagues use Travelpro bags (I’ve owned a couple of Travelpros over the years), but on the whole that brand is more popular with flight attendants than with pilots.

For a long time pilots resisted using roll-aboards at all. The thinking was that rolling your belongings was, like, too effeminate for the macho pilot (take me, for example). And so pilots would hand-haul their 40-odd pounds of personal luggage and pilot gear through the airport, toning their tough-guy biceps and making many a chiropractor happy.

By the way, have you ever heard somebody refer to roll-aboard bags as “roller board” bags? I was on a plane a few weeks ago and the flight attendant made an announcement reminding people to stow their “roller boards” handle-first into the bins.

My smaller bag, hung from my roller board using a hook that I designed myself, is a $300 Tumi briefcase that I bought about six months ago and quickly learned to hate, with its useless, miniature exterior pockets that I can barely squeeze my fingers into.

I’m something of a pro when it comes to short-notice, multi-climate packing. Here’s a tip: Go with lightweight clothing. What a concept, I know, but I’m amazed by how many people travel with heavy cotton jeans — even to hot climates. I own a lot of fast-dry synthetics. They’re not stylish, but when have I ever been? On the other hand I can launder a pair of pants in the hotel room bathtub and they’re dry before morning.

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GO-AROUNDS

Re: The Funniest Thing Ever Written

Several readers emailed demanding that I immediately scan and post copies of the 1988 “Guide to Harvard University Dining Services” booklet that I wrote about last week. A great idea, but the thing is 38 double-sided pages long. Tell you what: I’ll do it, but not for free. My price is $5, sent to my PayPal account. I figure if 20 people are interested, that’s $100, which makes it worth my trouble. Once I hit a hundred bucks I’ll send scans of every page to anybody who wants to see them, or else I’ll post them somewhere on my home site. If I don’t hit the $100 mark within the next 10 days I’ll refund your donations. (I really don’t expect to bring in much beyond that, as people will be waiting for the early birds to cover the cost.)

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Another factor is the aircraft type. Two-engine planes are subject to what we call ETOPS (extended twin-engine operations) restrictions, which might result in a different, less direct routing than a plane with four engines can accept. ETOPS rules require planes to remain within particular flying distances (three hours, most commonly) of an acceptable diversion airport. (The diversion airports themselves will vary, subject to weather.) Across the North Atlantic it makes little difference; two engines or four there are always adequate diversion options relatively close by. Over the Pacific, though, it’s a little different, and there might be considerable differences between a route operated by, say, a two-engine 777, and the same route operated by a four-engine 747.

We were flying from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to New York on a 757. While taxiing out, the plane’s air conditioning malfunctioned and the cabin temperature became very hot. After several minutes of troubleshooting, the problem could not be fixed and we taxied back to the gate. The captain explained that although it was permissible to continue on with the broken AC, a whole new flight plan was required, including an altered routing that would add over 45 minutes’ flying time — in turn requiring us to take on more fuel. We departed more than an hour late. I’m baffled. Why on earth would a broken air conditioner mandate a whole new flight plan and a longer routing?

For better or worse, crews are often reluctant to to explain the technical nitty-gritty of mechanical failures, and this is a great example of how, as a result, a passenger’s perception of the problem — in this case, “a broken air conditioner” — isn’t nearly the whole story.

Planes are not air-conditioned in the manner of your car or home; there is no air conditioner, per se. The machinery used to heat and cool the cabin is something known in pilot parlance as a “pack” (an acronym for pneumatic air cycle kit). Normally there are two packs, located in the belly of the aircraft. They are supplied by bleed air from the engines, adjusting temperature by means of a compressor, turbine and air-to-air heat exchanger; there is no coolant gas (i.e., Freon). These same packs are also responsible for pressurization, which is where the complications described above enter the picture.

A single functioning pack is adequate to maintain both adequate pressure and temperature. Thus if one fails, a flight can still be dispatched safely. However, you’ve lost your redundancy; if the remaining pack were to fail, pressurization and temperature control would be lost entirely. So, single-pack operation entails some important restrictions — namely a lower-than-normal altitude and the need to stay within a certain distance to a diversion airport at all times. The exact rules vary from plane to plane, but a typical example is having to remain below 35,000 feet and within 60 minutes’ flying time of a suitable landing spot (transoceanic flights are likely to be forbidden outright). Usually this increases both flying time and fuel burn. In this case, a flight from Puerto Rico to New York that was originally planned to be mostly over water now required a longer inland routing at a more fuel-thirsty altitude.

I was once on a flight from Chicago to Atlanta and we had to make an emergency landing in Nashville due to something that made it necessary to fly only as high as 10,000 feet. Due to such a low altitude, we were told, we would burn too much gas and could not reach Atlanta nonstop. Were they telling us the truth and how serious was the situation?

This sounds perfectly legitimate to me. See the previous question. Every so often a plane will be altitude-restricted due to this or that mechanical issue — perhaps something pressurization-related. This will increase fuel burn to the point where an interim stop is required. (Remember that you need enough fuel not only to reach your destination, but enough to reach at least one alternate airport, plus a substantial buffer on top of that.) This malfunction might be something that happens en route, or the flight might be planned that way from the start.

About a year ago I was working a flight from South America to the United States. Over the Caribbean, a pressurization malfunction dictated a prompt descent. Efforts to troubleshoot the problem failed, and so we had to stay low. Together with our dispatchers we ran some calculations, and sure enough, it would have been impossible to complete the flight without violating legal fuel parameters. And so we wound up diverting to Puerto Rico.

You speak of an “emergency landing.” Passengers have a habit for referring to any diversion or precautionary landing as an “emergency,” when most are in fact precautionary or even routine. Declaration of an emergency is reserved for situations that are a lot more urgent — such as when there is a risk of injury or damage to the airplane, when the extent of a problem is not fully known, and/or or when priority air traffic control handling is required. Knock on wood: I’ve made several diverts and one or two precautionary landings, but never an emergency landing.

My mother was on a flight that couldn’t take off because an engine wouldn’t start. They were towed back to the gate and had to have the engine started with the help of an external cart of some sort. Could you explain what causes an engine to fail to start, how the external is used, and why it’s safe to fly in this condition?

That “the engine would not start” doesn’t sound right. That’s not telling me much. Starting a jet engine is a multi-step process and the malfunction could involve any of several components — not all of which are ultimately responsible for the continued running of the engine. Again, an airplane is not a car, and a jet engine does not start, stop or run the way a piston engine does.

Jet engines are started using compressed air, which is normally supplied either by the APU (the small auxiliary turbine in the back) or another, already running engine. This air spins the engine’s compressors to a certain minimum RPM, at which point fuel is introduced. Combustion then accelerates the compressors and turbines to “idle” speed, and the starter (air valve) is shut off.

It sounds to me like there was a problem with the APU generating adequate duct pressure to get the compressors spinning to the necessary RPM. Why this may have been happening I can’t say. There are different possibilities (duct problem, valve problem, unusually high elevation …). And so, an external air machine — sometimes referred to as an “air cart” or “huffer cart” — needed to be hooked up instead. In fact, before the advent of APUs (the Boeing 727 was the first jetliner to have one), jet engines were always started this way.

Once up and turning, jet engines don’t shut off or “stall” the way the engines in cars sometimes do. However, if for whatever reason an engine failure occurred later in flight and was to be restarted, this air problem no longer applies. You can use the APU, the other engine or the speed of the airplane — the airflow itself pushing into the engine — to turn the compressors to the required RPM.

More on the weirdness of jet engines here and here.

I was on a Southwest flight from Chicago to Portland, Ore. We were at 35,000 feet and the air was very choppy. The captain came on and apologized. He told us that although it was much smoother at 37,000 feet, we were “too heavy” to climb that high and would have to ride out the bumps for a while. Really? Why would another 2,000 feet make that much difference?

For fuel economy, if not a smoother ride, higher is always better, but planes can climb only as high as their weight allows. As you climb, the air thins. Engine output is reduced, and the wing cannot support as much airplane as it can down low. A given cruise altitude must account for both high-speed and low-speed stalls, in both smooth and turbulent conditions. Over the course of a flight, climb capabilities improve as fuel is burned away. The allowable altitude at any given time isn’t something you ballpark; there are specific maximum altitudes based on very specific weights, and they must be adhered to. The difference between 35,000 and 37,000 can be fairly significant.

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