I can think of a few: TSA, delayed flights, garbage in your seat pocket. Screaming kids and misdirected luggage. "CNN Airport News."

Or, how about the blizzard of cardboard placards that hotel chains insist on littering their rooms with? I spend a quarter of my life in hotel rooms, and I resent having to spend the first five minutes of every stay gathering up an armful of this diabolical detritus and heaving it into a corner where it belongs. Attention, innkeepers: This is fundamentally bad business. One's first moments in a hotel room should be relaxing. The room itself should impart a sense of welcome. It shouldn't put you to work.

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?

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I routinely fly from Los Angeles to Beijing on United. It's an all-daylight flight over Alaska and Russia. How can I find the approximate route the Air China flight takes on the same route? I'm flying that airline later in the month and would like to know what I'll be seeing below.

Routings aren't commonly airline-specific. The determining factors tend to be air traffic control constraints and weather (winds, storms, etc.). Routings tend to be somewhat consistent, but it can vary day to day, even for flights between the same two cities.

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.

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All of these measures in place today -- the liquids and gels rules, the pointy object confiscations, the multiple ID checks, the body-scanners and the pat-downs -- would they have stopped the Sept. 11 attacks?

Of course not. The success of the 2001 attacks had nothing to do with box cutters. The hijackers' critical tool was an intangible one: the element of surprise. That is, taking advantage of our understanding and expectations of a hijacking. What weapons they had in their bags was irrelevant. They could have used anything.

For that matter, would any of these measures have prevented the terrorist bombing of Pan Am 103? How about the bombings of Air India 182 or UTA 772?

Again the answer is no. It was bombs in the lower holds that got those planes.

I don't know about you, but when I'm on a plane I worry a lot more about what's going on below deck -- in checked luggage and cargo -- than I do about passengers and their carry-ons. The Transportation Security Administration tells us that all checked bags are scanned nowadays for explosives, and that's about the most valuable thing the agency does for us. I just hope agents do it with as much over-the-top scrutiny as they use to paw through carry-ons looking for forks and toothpaste.

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Why, then, is it so bloody hard to find a proper bookstore at an airport? Not all of us pre-load our reading material on a Kindle.

I was in Detroit the other day. The terminal at DTW is one of America's best, and the mile-long concourse is jammed with retail shops. But do you think I could find a book in there? If I wanted a diamond bracelet, a $300 Tumi briefcase or a cup of gourmet coffee, on the other hand, no problem.  But a book?

Sure, there are places selling books -- there are lots of places selling books -- provided you're interested in one of a tiny sample of titles. There was something vaguely North Korean about walking the length of the concourse and seeing the exact same hardcovers, over and over and over and over -- Steve Jobs staring out at me every 20 steps or so from the shelves of any of 50 different shops, all utterly indistinguishable from one another.

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JFK's Terminal 3 (scheduled for replacement in 2013) was voted the worst, while the Hajj Terminal in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was ranked best.

These things are subjective, and we all have our own criteria, but both lists leave me scratching my head.

As to the worsts, they've obviously never been to the arrivals hall at Dakar (or, from what I've been told by several emailers, to N'djili Airport in Kinshasa, Congo). The best list, too, is a little strange. I'm unsure how fair it was including the Hajj terminal -- a building that is open only six weeks each year and visited almost exclusively by pilgrims. Seoul's Incheon airport is a well-deserved inclusion, but conspicuously absent is Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi. BKK ought to be there on aesthetic merits alone -- its central terminal is one of the most stunning buildings I've ever seen.

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A couple of weeks ago  I proposed my idea for the American Hysteria Hall of Shame, a ranking of our more laughable and self-defeating overreactions to perceived security threats over the past decade. Motto: "Malignantibus Parta! Timor vincit omnia!"

Safely assured of a top spot in the Hall, or so I thought, was the time I had a butter knife confiscated by overzealous TSA guards. I mean, what could be more ridiculous than taking a butter knife from a uniformed, on-duty pilot?

Answer: confiscating a fork from a uniformed, on-duty airline pilot.

It happened the other day in Mexico City, at the special crew inspection checkpoint at Benito Juarez International Airport. Yes, I'm dropping the "American" part and changing the name to the "Security Hysteria Hall of Shame," since, as you'll see, we are not the only ones who have lost our minds.

I knew there was trouble when the X-ray belt came to a stop and I was asked to open my bag.

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The Baldwin brouhaha comes on the heels of a splashy New York Times story about the supposed harmlessness of electronic devices. The gist of public perception -- certainly the perception of Mr. Baldwin -- fueled and refueled by articles like this, is that the prohibition against personal electronic devices is a waste of time.

Well, it is and it isn't. It depends which gadgets you're talking about, and for what reasons.

Can a cellphone really interfere with a plane's systems and avionics? The answer is that it's highly unlikely, but possible. That's not the answer you want, I know, but like almost everything in commercial aviation, it depends. For example, although a plane's electronics are designed with interference in mind, if the shielding is old or faulty there's a greater potential for trouble.

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And in place of "something funny" you may substitute the words "exasperating" or "troubling" or "a national embarrassment."

The latest from the Department of You Can't Make This Up involves a teenage girl who was not allowed to carry a purse onto a flight in Norfolk, Va., because it was embroidered with the design of a handgun.

That's right, embroidered. According to reports, 17-year-old Virginia Gibbs was told by Transportation Security Administration that bringing such a purse through the checkpoint constitutes a federal offense. She was given the option of giving up the purse or sending it along as checked luggage.

TSA says the problem is that such designs can be mistaken by scanners for the real thing, resulting in checkpoint closures and delays. On the one hand that is not unreasonable (though it does make us think that if you can't tell the difference between a purse and a gun, how good is this technology at identifying explosives?). On the other, more logical hand, once they saw and realized it was a purse, what would the harm have been in giving it back to the girl and letting her through? If there was going to be a closure or a delay, it already happened. Confiscating the bag no longer served a purpose.

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Somerville, Mass. That's where I spent Thanksgiving. Which is to say, at home.

Normally I work over the holidays. As a bottom-feeder on my airline's seniority list, it's an opportunity to score one of those high-quality layovers that are normally out of reach. Other pilots want to be home with their kids or watching football, and so I get to spend Christmas in Egypt, the Fourth of July in Belgium, New Year's Eve in Barcelona or Thanksgiving in Cape Town.

That's how it works at an airline. Every month you put in your preferences: where you'd like to fly, which days you'd like to be off, which insufferable captains you hope to avoid and so on. There are separate bids at each base, for each aircraft type, and for both captain and first officer -- all of which are themselves assigned through periodic seniority bidding. The award process then begins with the most senior pilot in your category and works its way down. Each pilot's "line," as our months are called, is filled with trips until we reach a certain number of pay-hours. When it finally gets to the dregs, lower-rung pilots have their pick of the scraps.

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Don't laugh. It actually happened last week aboard a Chautauqua Airlines (Delta Connection) regional jet on its way into LaGuardia Airport.

The captain had stepped out to use the toilet, leaving the first officer and flight attendant in the cockpit. (Rules require that a second crew member always be present in the cockpit; in this case that meant the plane's sole flight attendant.) When the lavatory door jammed, he was unable to extricate himself for several minutes.

Sorry, there's no training or checklists for this one. It comes down to common sense. If the door really is stuck, you break out of there. The doors are pretty flimsy; it shouldn't be difficult.

And that is what the Chautauqua captain eventually did.

The problem was, a passenger had gone and knocked on the cockpit door, attempting to explain to the first officer and flight attendant what was happening. Presumably he was just trying to help out. The captain would not have asked him to do this, since obviously his colleagues in the cockpit weren't going to take the man's word for what was happening. A passenger in any way contacting the cockpit was bound to trigger an unnecessary sequence of events.

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Sometimes, yes, though some airlines intentionally separate their crews, with pilots staying in one hotel and flight attendants in another.

On international routes the typical layover lasts between 24 and 48 hours. They can sometimes be shorter, but just as often they are longer, especially in the low season or in cities that don't have daily service. I've been fortunate enough to enjoy four or five days at a time in some pretty special places. My Flickr archives serve as a sort of layover photologue

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Naturally the event was captured on video and became an Internet sensation even before the fire trucks had finished with their foam. How quaint seem the days, not all that long ago, when people would wait around excitedly for the nightly news in order to catch some grainy footage.

I'm somewhat loath to give this incident more attention than it has already gotten. Landing gear malfunctions tend to be splendidly telegenic, but rarely if ever are they going to end in catastrophe.

Back in 2005 we had the grotesquely overhyped saga of JetBlue Flight 292, an Airbus A320 that touched down in California with its nose gear twisted. This non-event, covered here and here, became a days-long media spectacle. In 2010 an ASA regional jet made an emergency landing in New York  after a main gear malfunction, and just last week an Iran Air Boeing 727 touched down sans its nose gear in Tehran.

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This time it was a Ryanair 737. At London's Stansted airport, passengers watched with reported "horror" as a problem with the jet's windscreen was repaired using what they took to be duct or gaffer's tape. The plane took off for Riga, Latvia, only to return to Stansted 20 minutes later when, according to the UK tabloid Sun, the tape apparently came loose and began making "disturbing noises."

Granted, anything from the Sun is to be taken with a grain of salt, but this story was picked up by Gizmodo and other sites, and pretty soon millions of people were reading about it.

Say what you want about Ryanair overall -- this is a carrier known to push the boundaries of "low-cost carrier" into ever more controversial directions -- but this is another one of those things that looks a lot worse than it is.

For starters, there was no duct tape. The mechanics had applied a heavy-duty aluminum bonding tape known as "speed tape." Embarrassing as it might appear, superficial or noncritical components are routinely patched with this material. It's a temporary fix, until more substantive repairs are made later on. The tape is extremely durable and is able to expand and contract through a wide range of temperatures.

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The first thing I need to backpedal about is my verdict on the looks of the new Boeing 787 "Dreamliner."

"Aesthetically it's no 747, but it's a handsome plane," I wrote of the 787 in a column earlier this month. "Confident in a way not unlike its older and smaller sibling, the 757."

Confident, maybe, but have you taken a look at that tail? It's too small, out of proportion with the rest of the jet. And its odd, too-sharp curvature gives the plane a fishlike appearance.

You might remember my comparison between jetliners and skyscrapers, borrowing from the architecture critic Paul Goldberger. "Most architects who design skyscrapers focus on two aesthetic problems," wrote Goldberger in an issue of the New Yorker a few years back. "How to meet the ground and how to meet the sky ..." It's much the same with airplane designers, and if we think of a jetliner as a horizontal skyscraper, its beauty is gained or lost mainly through the sculpting of the nose and tail.

(Am I the only one to notice how they don't make planes or skyscrapers the way they used to?)

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I imagined a city-state. It was a huge new metropolis, purpose-built from scratch -- like Brasilia or Abuja, except much bigger. A gleaming new capital of the world.

As a global crossroads, my city-state needed a strategic location, equidistant between the world's most populous regions. The spot I picked was along the Mediterranean coast of eastern Libya, where an atlas told me (perhaps not entirely accurately) there was ample empty space and access to the sea.

But it wasn't sea routes that I was interested in. My reason for creating this imaginary place was to create the imaginary airline that would have to come with it. It would be one of the biggest airlines in the world.

Bored at school, or in the evenings at the dining room table after pretending to finish my homework, I would sketch out the route network of this fictitious carrier. I'd mark off my capital city (it never had a name, and neither did its airline) with a red circle, and from there the lines burst outward like a great spider web; down into Africa, up into Europe, through the Middle East and into Asia. I got pretty specific: flights to Kinshasa went nonstop, but getting to Jakarta required a layover in Bombay. We served Victoria Falls three times weekly for the benefit of European safari-goers. Other destinations were undecided. Taipei? Should we fly to Taipei, perhaps through Hong Kong, or via our prized route to Guangzhou? I could sit for an hour or more pondering the network choices of an imaginary airline.

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The 747-8 is the latest variant in the 42-year-old lineage of the world's most iconic -- if no longer the largest -- commercial plane. It's also perhaps the best-looking jetliner I've ever seen -- a little nip and tuck having perfected the the baseline 747's elegant silhouette. A nice contrast to that beastly double-decker from Toulouse. With its scalloped cowls and tapered wingtips, it's a sexy thing -- if dressed a little oddly in Boeing's orange house colors.

My first impression of the 787 was that it's bigger than I expected -- closer to a 777 than a 767. Aesthetically it's no 747, but it's a handsome plane, confident in a way that's not unlike its older and smaller sibling, the 757.

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Yes, I think it has. Presenting the new look of Malaysia Airlines.

Hey, wow, a swooshy thing. How original. It's two swooshes, actually, squashed and scribbled together like tandem shark fins in a peculiar and wholly unattractive pattern.

When I say "swooshy thing" I am talking specifically about the "Generic Meaningless Swoosh Thing" or GMST, the concept that, over the past 10 years or so, has become the lowest common denominator of airline brand identity, seen worldwide from Aeromexico to El Al. The term was coined by Amanda Collier, a graphic design veteran, quoted in one of this column's earlier livery discussions. Said Collier, "the GMST is what happens when any corporation gathers senior management, their internal creative department, and a design agency in order to develop a new logo. The managers will talk about wanting something that shows their company is 'forward thinking' and 'in motion,' and no fewer than three of them will reference Nike, inventors of the original Swoosh. The creative types smile, nod, secretly stab themselves with their X-Acto knives, and shit out variations on a motion theme until everyone gets tired of arguing about it."

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What I think is that it's a cool enough idea for a series -- I'm a little surprised it hasn't been done already -- but that I'm not going to watch it.

I'm not going to watch it because my feelings are hurt, not having been invited aboard, as it were, as a technical advisor. And also because ... well, because it's a TV show, not a historical documentary, and I'd be liable to find myself sitting there grumbling at the screen, pointing out inaccuracies and taking the whole enterprise a little too seriously.

I do like those sexy shots in the promos, though. Of those sleek old 707s, I mean, and of JFK's now decrepit Terminal 3, the former Pan Am "Worldport," sparkling and elegant again through the magic of special effects.

The most storied and influential franchise in the history of commercial aviation, Pan American World Airways ceased operations in 1991 after years of heavy losses and decline -- the last straw, perhaps, being the terrorist bombing of Flight 103 over Scotland in 1988.

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Two of the most frightening words in air travel, those are.

You know what I'm talking about: The Transportation Security Administration checkpoint line is crawling along at its usual slug's place, when all of a sudden it groans to a total stop.

"BAG CHECK!" bellows a screener.

Up ahead, at the luggage scanner, a guard has spied something unusual on the monitor. He switches off the belt and calls for a colleague. And for the next several minutes, nothing happens.

The seconds tick by as the guard waits for his colleague. One minute passes. Then two. Then three. All the while, the line behind you grows longer.

"BAG CHECK!"

Eventually a supervisor ambles over. There's a conference. For some reason these situations require a sort of football huddle, with lots of whispering and pointing, before finally things get moving again. At last the bag is either sent on its way, or removed for a closer, hands-on inspection.

The obvious question: Is there a reason the offending piece of luggage can't simply be pulled from the machine and screened separately -- on a table behind or to one side of the main platform? The screener could archive the scan if need be, and the belt and the line could keep moving.

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As most people do, I remember the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, with an acute clarity: the subway ride out to Logan, and the inordinately large cockroach I saw crawling along the platform at Government Center station. My plane to Florida, taking off only seconds behind American's doomed Flight 11. The diversion to Charleston, S.C., where I joined a gasping throng of fellow strandees gathered around a TV in a terminal restaurant. And later, the long drive home in a rented car.

But I wish, as a country, that we were past this.

It's not the anniversary itself that irks me. The 10-year mark is -- or should be -- worthy of our solemn respects and a national timeout. But commemorating the attacks would feel a lot more meaningful if, in fact, we had ever stopped commemorating them. Our healing process has been never-ending -- occasionally introspective and edifying, but all too often maudlin and suffocating.

Maybe that's a terrible and insensitive thing to say, I don't know.

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