Frontier Justice 17: Slow Ride to the Danger Zone

By Johnny Loftus

I’m a big fan of the word “tarmac,” so when I’m on one in real life, I consider it some kind of victory. Recently, I took a trip that involved the use of regional flights, which meant that I was soon stuffed into the back of a Bombardier CRJ700 hurdling its way through the rainy black gloom above the Washington, DC area and Dulles International Airport. These regional planes are sort of bonkers. They look legitimately sleek, with wings that reach at a broad diagonal toward the tail, the tips swept artfully upward like the final flourish on a particularly cool paper airplane. But inside, particularly toward the back, they’re as loud as if the lavatory was actually a screened in porch.

The General Electrics screamed and whined, and the glow from the navigation lights glanced off the bits of snarling atmosphere outside, and I found myself cursing an armrest that seemed designed to fit the average height of 18th century man. I pictured Paul Giamatti as John Adams, lips pursed and eyes bulging from beneath his frock wig as he wrestled unsuccessfully with a seatbelt that crushed the bottom third of his velvet topcoat. “Sirs, I am the vice president of our fair and blessed new nation! I demand a say in how this confounding contraption decides to strangle my insides until I might burst! This is that crotchety bastard Franklin’s doing, I have no doubt!”Lightning flashed outside as the terror on wings made its final descent.

We landed and taxied for awhile, until the flight attendant announced that we’d arrived at our gate. The engines were off, but now it was the liquid crystal twinkle and digital fanfare of 60 cellular devices powering up at once that filled the cabin. That is, until the front door opened, and I saw the tarmac. For all my griping about regional flights, the benefit for an obsessive like me is that they often still load and unload passengers directly on the tarmac instead of through a jetway. And it’s a trip.

If you’re departing, you usually have to climb down a staircase at the gate. This is already disorienting. But then you burst onto the tarmac itself, where there’s a brontosaurus of a 757 skulking 20 yards away and luggage trains rumble by like Jawa vehicles. Types on all sides are clad in florescent vests. You walk on a path set out by tagged suitcases to the aircraft’s front hatch, which has unfolded with the stairs in the door, and as you’re climbing on you feel like an embattled government hack fleeing the country, praying he isn’t shot in the back by a dissident. Or, if you’re in a better mood, you imagine you’re the bassist in a mildly successful touring rock act in the 70s. And then you have to fight the urge to stop at the top to turn and wave.

If departures are their own fun on the regional flight amusement ride, the arrival can be even crazier, especially at night, in rainy Spring weather, and at Dulles International. As I watched the front hatch open, I thought how weird it was that they were just going to throw us out there, the rain spitting into the plane’s sorry but still fiercely proud first class section. They didn’t rent a jetway from somewhere? I thought. Aren’t they asking for a lawsuit from some enterprising litigant who will swear he caught a cold, broke his ankle, and lost his hearing when he was forced to descend at a sharp angle from the aircraft and traverse a 30-foot distance on bare pavement in the rain? And yet, here we were, the flight attendant thanking us and nodding like this was Foghat’s plane and we were the catering crew. I thought being on the tarmac was awesome, of course. But I didn’t know what Dulles had in store next for my regional flight waking dream.

I haven’t taken the time to look this up, but I’m pretty sure Dulles has bought a fleet of all terrain personnel carriers from a science fiction future that it has refit as courier buses to shuttle weary regional passengers from their strange, ground-level spur of a terminal to the action over at the adult table. After the wet, awesome walk across the tarmac, we a wide corridor that led to hatchways indicating different terminal destinations. I thought nothing of it, located mine, and walked through the doors…into what felt like a subway car. Seats lined the walls, chromed poles dotted the center, and stirrups hung from the ceiling at regular intervals. I grabbed a pole just as something beneath us lurched to life. Outside, the window was level with the plane we just left, its fancy wings disappearing as whatever vehicular wormhole I’d just entered made its way to the dimension where Alien James Woods lives. I leaned across the seat nearby and peered downwards, and all I could see were the sewer covers and communication beacons flying by.

So here I am traveling across this expanse of airplane and support vehicle highway in an oversized and modified train car (maybe) in a wild Frogger maneuver, and a plane literally lands 50 yards away, and I’m really starting to get confused. When it finally gets to the “other side,” the machine docks next to three or four other ones just like it, their train car cabins resting like subway muffin tops on enormous chassis and truck tires that had to be like six feet high. The secret of conveyance had been revealed, but it wasn’t any more clear. And it really did dock. The rain was causing blurry halos around the communication lights, and the night was playing tricks with the shadows, and as the blocky mothership hulk of the terminal rose out of the rain in greeting, there was a series of thunks from the front of the vehicle. Lights winked on, pod bay doors were slid open, and I was suddenly surrounded by the echoey chatter of the TSA messages and ambient conversational noise common to any earthly airport terminal. Oh, and the snaking line for Five Guys Burgers. Man, I wasn’t in the future at all. I’d just been traveling regionally, and it was time to get back to my home tarmac.

JTL

Tags: Dulles International Airport, Bombardier, CRJ700, Paul Giamatti, John Adams, Jawa, Five Guys, Frogger, James Woods