Pondering Dogmatic Tale of Air Travel Travail

The sheer nastiness of air travel worsens with each year. Many of us, at some time or another, have experienced its horrors.

In case you have never flown, or have forgotten the utter beastliness of the process, or perhaps are one of those sunny, eternally cheerful characters who make the best of a lousy situation, let me remind you of some of the horrible things that can happen to you when you need to travel from point A to point B and choose the airplane as your mode of transport.

It is a generally held belief that for most of your trip you’ll be sitting down. Wrong. For hours and hours at the start and hours and hours at the end you’ll be standing.

When you enter the airport you’ll wait in line while faceless men and women check you for firearms, bombs and vegetable matter.

Once past them, you’ll wait in line again while slightly friendlier people check that you have the right to be there at all. In this line, just in front of you, there will be an angry man. There is always an angry man in this particular line and he is always just in front of you.

When he reaches the check-in desk he will demand at least 18 changes to the details on his ticket. To make these changes requires the use of a state-of-the-art computer. These computers have been rejected by the Pentagon as too complicated and too expensive and too unreliable--which explains why the angry man gets angrier and you get a backache.

I have suggested to several airlines that perhaps they should institute an express lane, such as you find in supermarkets. Airline express lanes would be reserved for calm people who are happy with their reservations and just want to sit down somewhere.

On now to the departure area. But first, more security checks of your carry-on baggage and more requests that you remove all metal objects from your person. I had to take my belt off once. The humiliation of having to hold your pants up manually, in a crowded airport terminal, is crushing.

Now, at last, you’re in the departure lounge. You can sit down. No, you can’t. Every seat is taken and most of the floor space is occupied by Scandinavian backpackers in need of sleep. In desperation, you look for entertainment.

Failing to find it, you buy a Jackie Collins paperback from the bookstore and try to read it standing up. There are few world rules of literature in existence, but one of them is that you can’t read a Jackie Collins novel standing up.

Alcohol, in sufficient quantity, takes the edge off the ennui, but take care. If you’re paralytic by the time it comes to boarding, they won’t let you on. I can’t imagine why not. Unconscious passengers must be a stewardess’ Eden.

Millennia later you are told that there is fog in Anchorage. Your takeoff is delayed by three hours. What this has to do with your trip to Miami is a mystery, but at least the tedium is alleviated by the reappearance of the angry man.

He is now very angry indeed, apoplectic even, and you fear for his health and sanity. As he, too, is going to Miami, you also wonder whether the pressurization systems on the aircraft will be able to cope with such a vast output of fury.

Then, a miracle. The fog in Alaska--plus the blizzard over the Falkland Islands--have moved on and your plane is now ready for departure. You shuffle down the tube, you smile wanly at the welcoming stewardess, you hunch your way down the aisle and you reach your seat. The angry man is sitting in it.

Cowardice, both moral and physical, overwhelms you. Meekly, you accept the situation and sit down in his place. Anything for quiet life. You sneak a look at him. He is reading, with a sort of furious concentration, the instructions on the sick bag.

This means one of two things: He will either be violently ill shortly after takeoff, or he has forgotten to bring a Jackie Collins book for himself. Unfortunately, it is almost always the latter.

Five minutes after your plane has shuddered into the air the angry man will turn to you and begin reciting his life story. He is invariably a ball-bearing salesman from Idaho. While a perfectly worthy and respected profession, it’s not easy to be interested in the design, manufacture and sales of those little gizmos.

In a desperate attempt to get a word in edgewise, you invite him and his family to drop in any time he’s in the Los Angeles area. You scribble down the address of your bitterest foe.

You stumble off the aircraft, your head pounding from the effects of the angry man from Idaho, the movie you’ve seen three times already, the headphones designed by the Inquisition, the outraged infant four seats away and the food prepared by an artistic but inept housewife from Orange County.

The relief at finding that most of your luggage has traveled on the same airplane as you is so great that you’re inclined to express fulsome gratitude to every uniformed person you meet. I once thanked Burt Reynolds’ chauffeur. He was very nice about it.

There must be a better way. And there is. Here’s how it happens:

You are driven in luxury to the airport. You get out of your car and, without any fuss or bother, board your Personal Housing Unit. This PHU is clean and comfortable. It is stocked with the food and drink that you prefer. There is ample room for you to lie down at full stretch. And, most agreeable of all, it is completely private. Nobody from Idaho can get anywhere near you.

The PHU and its occupant don’t wait in lines. You’re not frisked or ticketed or asked personal questions. You don’t have to walk anywhere, you don’t have to talk to anyone and there’s not a backpacker to be seen. Instead, you and your PHU are delicately lifted aboard your aircraft by caring men with soothing voices.

This is perhaps the moment to take the small tranquilizer prescribed by your physician, which will ensure that you sleep soundly throughout your journey, to arrive full of pep and go. And you will get there. A lost suitcase can’t complain; the occupant of a PHU can.

And when you get to wherever you’re going, your PHU is easily converted into a small den or office where you can relax, take a drink, snack on a little something and gloat in the sure and certain knowledge that you have cracked, at last, the dreadful business of traveling by air.

And if you think that all this could only happen in some kind of futuristic utopia, let me assure you that it’s taking place even now as you read. The privacy, the absence of the angry man from Idaho . . . it’s all available and relatively inexpensive. There’s only one condition attached: You have to be a dog.

Wolfy, my malamute/timber wolf mixture, traveled in just this style from Los Angeles to Mississippi recently, and the silly thing complained all the way. Of course, she had never experienced what we go through.

Maybe there’s a lesson in this for us humans. Next time I fly, I might try scratching, howling and whining. You never know . . . it might just work.