Now that flying is the safest form of transportation, I like it less and less.
The reporter in me wants to see the machine at work, hear the whoosh of the engines, smell the kerosene.
A hint of danger might help.
Modern jets are like modern airports. They’re designed to be the same everywhere. Just as a McDonald’s in Beijing serves as a comforting reminder of home for the disoriented western traveler, so the plastic interior of today’s Boeing and the quiet swoosh-swoosh of its jet engines provide a reassuring familiarity whenever the weary traveler boards one. It seems to whisper – “Wherever you are, when you get on a Boeing, you’re on your way home.”
But just as McDonald’s is not really dining, traveling by jet is not really flying.
What if you like to fly?
Vladimir Nabokov regarded trains as a superior mode of transportation precisely because of the constant reminders offered by the machinery, as well as the colorful railroad personnel, of the act, and therefore the romance, of traveling—the clickety-clack of the rails, the long, low wail of the train whistle, the slow motion pitch and roll of cars being manhandled into place, even the woody scent of the slats in third-class seating.
Lincoln used to amuse and enthrall his sons by the simple act of reading railroad timetables aloud imitating the booming voice of the conductor.
Propeller planes offer similar emotions.
Jets do not.
CBS News radio reporter Edward R. Murrow, covering D-Day in 1944, said the hum of the B-17 and B-24 Liberator bombers on the morning of June 6 recalled distant strains of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Morning becomes Electra
As a reporter, I covered Brazil for four decades starting in the 1970s. My work often involved flying; Brazil is a big country.
Up until 1992, the nation’s busiest air route—the 250-mile shuttle linking Brazil’s two biggest cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro—was the exclusive domain of the Lockheed L188 Electra II, a bracing, four-engine prop plane seating as many as 104.
I flew in many an Electra.
I wrote about it when they substituted the venerable prop planes with jets.
In eulogizing the Electra, I said…
“…when the props start whirring, one by one, at first spitting a little then buzzing and bouncing and the Electra cabin begins to vibrate, I know I am about to fly again. I look out the window at those proud, silvery propellers exposing all their engineering, and I feel like Roosevelt winging his way to Teheran, Cairo and Casablanca. The fate of the world seems to hang in the balance.
When the Electra soars over Avenida Rubem Berta in São Paulo, pitching this way and that as the craft stabilizes, its props thrust forward gulping air, exhaust cutting a jagged trail, it’s 1942 again and brave men lift B-25 Mitchell bombers off the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet somewhere in the South Pacific, destination Tokyo.
Arrival on the Rio side is even better, with the plane swinging around the Sugar Loaf before descending along the trim crescent of Botafogo inlet to Santos Dumont’s single runway at the lip of Guanabara Bay.
Santos Dumont is the perfect airport for romance. The big picture window on the main concourse reveals what other airports attempt to conceal. Passengers walk on the tarmac to and from their flights. On arrival you are instantly outdoors, precisely what Rio de Janeiro is all about. The first sensation is a warm tropical breeze—what more can you ask of an airport?
Only Bogart and Bergman, with her flouncy hat and tears running down her cheeks, the fate of three little people in a crazy world hanging in the balance.
On departure, as on arrival, you are asked to walk. The props seem to invite inspection. One is tempted to kick the tires. The scent of tropical fruit and kerosene hangs in the air like a modern perfume.”
When you’re a Jet…
Today’s airports, by contrast, funnel passengers through a carpeted tube designed to seem like an extension of the terminal, which is itself designed as an extension of an anonymous “international land” in which all the signs are in English. You catch only a glimpse of the outer skin of the aircraft. Then you’re inside. Every effort is made to pretend you’re going to the movies, rather than flying to a distant and perhaps exotic, or even perilous, destination.
The whole experience has been demystified. They play the Thousand and One Strings version of The Girl From Ipanema while taking off and landing.
That’s not flying. It’s transportation.
Flying is Electra.
When it comes to jets, the only exception was the time I asked the pilot of a Brazilian airline about connections in Belem, the city at the mouth of the Amazon River.
“We can talk after the takeoff,” he said. “Would you like to sit up front?” He motioned toward the cockpit.
“Sure!”
It was a night flight from Paramaribo, Suriname to Cayenne in French Guyana. I took the navigator’s seat. It was tight, cool, dark except for the electric-blue lights of the instrument panel.
The perspective from the flight deck is wholly different from that of the passenger cabins out back. It’s a window not a wall, with the whole night spread out before you and the aircraft bursting into “a sky as pure as water” in the phrase by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the poet of pioneer aviators, in his 1929 memoir Southern Mail.
Cayenne is served by an exceedingly small airport. Ours was the only night flight. The captain radioed an invisible tower and suddenly…a white carpet flashed into view and I whispered to myself, “a harbinger of welcome…like a basket of light.”
Roads?…Where we’re going, we don’t need any roads
But for real flying, flying like Saint-Exupéry flying at the Twentieth Century dawn of flying, nothing beats the single-prop, six-seat Cessna 206, the workhorse of the Amazon!
Here’s how it feels…
I had occasion to board a Cessna 206 during a press junket to the Carajás Minerals Province in the southeastern Amazon rainforest in November of 1980. There are no roads in that part of the Amazon. There are no roads for hundreds of miles. The plane was on hand to convey a handful of reporters from Serra dos Carajás, headquarters of one of the world’s largest mining developments at the time, to a remote–and infamous–wildcat gold prospecting site called Serra Pelada.
At the Serra das Carajás airstrip, we milled around outside the tiny aircraft.
A teenage boy approached.
“Who’s that?” I asked the public relations handler.
“The pilot.”
Matters didn’t improve once we boarded. I couldn’t find my seatbelt. The boy pilot turned to me. “Seatbelt’s broken,” he said, grinning. “Try this!” He pointed to a coil of climbing rope wrapped around the seat. “Just tie it around your waist.”
I complied.
Things got worse when we took off into a bank of thunderheads. We made a steep, numbing pivot to get the dark clouds behind us.
“Storm’s coming,” said the boy pilot. There was no intercom, so he shouted over the roar of the engine. “But don’t worry. We can outrun it…I think.”
We approached Serra Pelada and began circling. The “town” had only one “street,” a pounded clay surface on a rise with wooden shacks on either side. I kept looking for the airstrip until I noticed people on the “street” were scurrying into the shacks as a siren wailed; it was so loud, we could hear it above the whirr of the Cessna. It was then I realized the “street” was the airstrip.
It was a bumpy landing. No tarmac, just dirt.
But I felt refreshed, as if cleansed of all my sins.
“That,” I told the press handler, “Is flying!”
I had a similar experience, a few years later, on a junket to Mato Grosso, the heart of Brazil’s fast-growing agribusiness sector.
This time, I had a seatbelt! The problem was that the Cessna’s passenger door had been removed following windshear damage the day before.
“Don’t worry,” said the pilot. “I’ll bank slightly to port and you won’t notice it.” At least the pilot was of age.
From 2,000 feet, we inspected the world’s largest soybean plantation, called Itamaraty, so uniform and vast you could discern the curvature of the earth, with the wind literally whipping us in the face through the naked doorframe. I tried to look out, rather than down.
Today, in my old age, I sometimes fly business class. They close the windows and serve cocktails. Flight attendants address you by name.
I like it.
But it’s not flying.
-Thomas Murphy, 2026
Coming Next Month: Did a Tribe of Warrior Women Once Inhabit the Deep Amazon Rainforest?
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Photo Credits: Clinton Groves https://www.airlinefan.com/airline-photos/1782551/Varig/Lockheed/L-188-Electra/PP-VJW/; Warner Bros.; Adrian Pingstone