the freedom of flight, or lack thereof

photo from ABC.com

Currently, I'm sitting at Gate B66 in Washington Dulles International Airport awaiting my flight back to Boston, and in addition to what I'm going to scrounge together for dinner when I get home around 9:00, I can't stop thinking about last night's premiere of ABC's Pan Am. It was an excellent hour of television that effectively transports its audience back to a romantic era of air travel in the early 1960s. Moreover, it's a show that boasts the potential to develop characters and stories a viewer can connect with while marveling at the simplicity of boarding a plane without passing through a full body scan.

I marveled last night at how the flight attendants and the passengers simply boarded the Clipper Majestic, straight from the airport terminal. When the plane took off, there were no safety and security announcements, and all that was requested of passengers was that they find their seats and buckle up*.

*What was missing from the depiction of air travel in the 1960s was cigarette smoke. I imagine that in that era the plane would have been as cloudy as the San Francisco fog - or Don Draper's office. I actually applaud ABC for this omission, regardless if it creates an historical inaccuracy.

It struck me as being so foreign compared to today's airport security and safety precautions. When flying down to Washington, I took a cab to the airport at 6:45am to catch my 8:30am flight because I was worried about the long security lines that inhabit airports on Saturday mornings. And this afternoon, I resisted scheduling an additional school visit in Northern Virginia because I did not want to get caught in the overwhelming traffic on my way back to Dulles.

After checking in for my flight and printing my boarding pass, using an automated kiosk, I passed through one of about three dozen different security lines before taking an intra-airport tram to arrive at my gate. I passed through easily enough, but to the left and right of me were people being held back because they forgot they had a receipt in their pocket, or had a cast that would need to be hand-wanded.

We live in a different time, in a different world, in which stepping foot in an airport is both safer and scarier than it was in 1963. The end result is that it is far less romantic, and that soaring through the skies is far less poetic for us than previous generations. But as First Officer Ted Vanderway tells us in Pan Am, it's all part of natural selection.

Though the skies and even the stars are no longer mythical frontiers, uncharted territories remain for current and future generations to discover and explore. Looking back at where we've been,compared to where we are now, only serves to remind us that there is no limit to where we can go.