Tiny, pre-jet age and repeatedly re-built LaGuardia Airport recently added fifty new flights to its daily operations. Boeing, once the sole commercial jetliner manufacturer in the world, is now rivaled by Airbus Industrie, by 1998 losing half its market share to the European conglomerate. And production is up for both companies. There are at least five hundred commercial aircraft in the air over the USA alone at any given moment.
The necessarily intricacy-laden concept of jetliner travel is perhaps our world's both most mundane and sensational enterprise. Modern commercial flight is psychically, if not physically, personally not reconcilable within us. Hence the last resort to banality. Ibis unlikely and unfortunate product of the intense clash of personal and public experience that is a sub- or super-sonic airline flight seems necessary for our spiritual survival, as intellectually, looking up with two feet planted firmly on mortal ground, flight is anything but banal.
