I flew via Alaska Airlines from Seattle to Ontario, Southern California. Alaska has an all-Boeing fleet, recently updated, and I flew in a relatively new 737-800. The airplane looks awkward on the ground, with its two huge engines riveted to the wings close to the fuselage. Its two winglets swing up as if shrugging in indecision, without logical association to their function of saving gasoline. The plane looks like an awkward goose with a fluffy, fat bottom. But in the air, the plane is poetry in motion. Rhyming, rhythmical, graceful.
The flight path took us north out of Sea-Tac International Airport, then a turn toward the South, where we flew straight toward the Tehachapis Mountains and east to Ontario. The turns were the poetry, wheeling around for the new direction. Outside Seattle, the plane took a long time in gaining altitute to 41,000 feet. It turned from heading north to fly south, with an uplifting, swooping motion, clockwise, to the east, following a circle toward the south. I was on the left side of the passenger compartment and watched the left wing gently and smoothly lift itself, tilting the plane nearly 45 degrees. I anticipated a slight pressure of centrifugal force, but experienced none, as if the plane were bouyed by the atmosphere, balancing our powerful accelerating motion, flinging us on our journey. As we came out of this long curve, we floated over Mt. Rainier, glowing white with snow and reflecting gold off its rocks in the low, late afternoon sun.
When we arrived at the mountain barrier to Southern California, we were at the western end of the Tehachapis. The plane floated over the mountain tops, which were illuminated like the tips of icebergs with the bright strings of lights of the mountain settlements below. Then, again gaining altitude, the plane wheeled counter-clockwise toward the east. We ran along the tops of the east-west range. It was as graceful a movement as an olympic skater executing a large circle at the extended hand of her partner. As we arrived over the San Bernardino County mountain communities, the plane then turned, right, to the south, swooping downward onto our approach path to the Ontario runway. We were eagles, feathered wings extended, falling down the swirling draft to the geometrical lines of the lighted runways.
It was slow motion ballet of aerodynamic grace that thrilled me and enlivened me with appreciation for the mechanical beauty of the huge passenger plane. I thought of the first persons to witness the Wright brothers' demonstrations of their new flying machine, awestruck with amazement as the little device left the ground, lifted twenty feet into the air, and banked into a swooping turn, as if it were a giant bird. It seemed more than a human achievement to them; so it was to me. It was flying made new.
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