The Flight - Part II

So, now I come to my current trip – the flight overseas to Salzburg, Austria to begin my three-month library internship. This was to be my first overseas flight since 1998, a time when I was not afraid of flying. Despite the fact that I A) procrastinated on packing until about an hour before I had to leave for the airport and B) the fact that flying stresses me out (period) I was not very anxious leading up to my flight overseas. I knew that I was going to be flying on Lufthansa which, according to AirDisaster.com (a site I have discovered courtesy of my amazing and wonderful boyfriend), has a relatively low occurrence of serious “events” (whatever that means). Plus I knew that I would be flying on an Airbus A330 which is a pretty good plane. Right?

The flight went smoothly overall, I have to say. There was one bad moment during take-off when the roaring engines suddenly cut back to near-silence. I assume this was because of some noise ordinance in the neighborhood we were flying over. Nevertheless it scared the living s*** out of me until I realized that the plane was still climbing. I was also a bit agitated by turbulence that we experienced somewhere over Greenland. (At least that’s where it looked like we were when I glanced out of the window.) But honestly, how the hell do you tell the difference between Greenland and that other s*** in the Arctic, anyway?

Everything else about the flight was pretty ok. I actually slept comfortably on my tray table for 2-4 hours. Both dinner and breakfast were served and the drink cart came by at least twice in between each meal. Unbelievable – I hadn’t had a meal on a plane in 10 years.

I don’t know why, but for some reason I was moved by the fact that we received meal service. Somehow, in some way, being served food (even airplane food) made the whole flying experience much more humanizing. Part of the problem with flying is that you are packed into a metal tube with hundreds+ other people in tiny little seats that are too close together – much like cattle are packed into freight cars for shipping. In the case of human-transport you are actually paying to be shipped like cattle cargo but in the “old days” (i.e. a mere decade ago) there were little things that made the whole experience feel less degrading than it does nowadays. At least for me it did.

Like being fed, even if the food was absolutely terrible. I know that there are many who would disagree with me or who don’t care how they fly as long as they get where they need to go. But I imagine that there are probably also some that have experienced the same sort of feelings as those I’m talking about.

Anyway, as I said, the flight was fine. We made it to Frankfurt, Germany in 9 hours and 35 minutes as advertised. We bustled joyfully out of the plane and down metal staircases (no jet way) to buses that were waiting to transfer us to the main terminal. I’m not sure whether Frankfurt is a Lufthansa hub (maybe most German cities are) but there were many, many Lufthansa planes there. Given my enhanced state of jet lag I decided that it would be amusing to take pictures of the row upon row of Lufthansa planes. Big planes, little planes. Many planes. All Lufthansa planes.

So I did.

Then came the propeller plane.

My connection flight from Frankfurt to Salzburg was on Austrian Airlines and since the flight is less than an hour, I assumed that the plane would certainly be smaller than my overseas flight. I had not exactly counted what I got, though.

To get on small connecting flights like mine to Salzburg, you give your ticket to an agent at a door which leads outside to a waiting bus. The bus takes you to your plane. I watched as my bus passed big jets, then little jets, each plane in the row smaller than the last until finally…we arrived.

At first I thought it was a joke. I mean, the plane we stopped next to seriously looked like it might have been used in the movie Never Cry Wolf. Ever seen that one? It’s about a guy who travels to Alaska to study wolf populations and to see what is causing the decline of caribou (a major part of the wolves’ diet) in that region. He has to fly on a propeller plane with engines that cut out in a very climactic scene. I could be wrong but from what I remember, the pilot has to reach out of the window and do something with the propellers to get the engine restarted.

Looking at my Austrian Airlines flight I wondered whether I had missed the notice about mandatory passenger propeller-emergency training. I mean seriously. This plane was tiny. I was on eye-level with the pilot standing next to the damn thing and I am not a tall girl.

I was not thrilled.

The flight itself was quite pretty. They usually are when you are flying so close to the ground that you can count the number of sheep grazing in a given field. The only bad moment came when we intentionally or unintentionally flew into an area of what looked to be turbulent thunderclouds. The plane dropped sharply and abruptly for what felt to be ages (probably just a second or two) and then shook from side to side as though a giant air-mastiff and grabbed us in its invisible jaws and was cheerfully worrying us like a dead squirrel.

Worse than that, I could have sworn that the engines cut out for a moment. I really thought we were going to die. And trust me; for once it was not just me. Other people were actually screaming and panicking when it happened – that’s how bad it was.

But I have to say…aside from this unpleasant incident, our flight was quick, relatively smooth and we did arrive in Salzburg whole and well (if a little shaken up). We actually flew over the place where I will be staying for the next three months as the plane was landing and I got a real thrill – wondering about the adventures yet to come.


So I finally made it to Salzburg. Sadly, over 200 people, also flying on an Airbus 330, on the same day and over the same ocean, were not so lucky. I would like to say that I felt a strong sense of connection to those people en route from Rio Di Janeiro to Paris, especially the others that may have been afraid of flying like I am. But I don’t think you can really understand unless you are actually there, experiencing what they must have experienced, in real time.

I know, I know. This has nothing to do with libraries or librarianship. Or my internship for that matter (except for the fact that I used air transport to get to my internship destination). But, as I mentioned before, this blog is not just about libraries. I have a feeling that a lot of the added flavor one gets from living in a foreign country for any given period of time, would be lost if I restricted my entries to books, research and the Dewey Decimal Classification System.

And trust me…there will be plenty to say about that too.