Man’s Flight of Fancy Has Its Ups and Downs

The agent at the US Air check-in counter flipped through Bill Dorsey’s tickets. Pittsburgh to Newark; nothing unusual about that. Newark to Amsterdam; check.

But Amsterdam to Singapore?

Singapore to Taipei?

Taipei to San Francisco?

San Francisco to Pittsburgh?

All in less than 61 hours?

“Oh, my God,” the agent said.

Yes, this mild-mannered man with the thin mustache, with the blue blazer and the khakis and the sensible brown shoes, was about to travel 24,902 miles, braving cabins filled with crying babies and disgruntled frequent fliers, subjecting himself to endless courses of airline food, tucking his long legs into places where long legs do not go.

In the course of this odyssey, he would go from plane to airport to plane, never stepping out to see the exotic lands he visited.

“You poor soul,” said another agent.

But Bill Dorsey thought he was the luckiest man in the world.

There was a time when flight was romantic, exciting, wonderful. Travelers would dress to board an airplane; they would enjoy elegant service. And because it was all so new, every takeoff and every landing was a thrilling experience.

Those days have gone the way of the biplane.

Now, for most, flight is merely a way to get from one place to another. If you’re lucky, it will not be an ordeal.

So in a way, Bill Dorsey is a throwback. He had only flown once in his 49 years--in 1989, when he took wife Linda and daughter Jennifer from their home in Clarksburg, W.Va., to Walt Disney World. The park was nice, he says, but the flight was fabulous.

He especially liked the takeoffs and landings. “I could just sit there and do this all day,” he told Linda. “Some day I’d like to get on one of these planes and go around the world.”

“Not thinking that it would ever happen, of course,” he adds today.

Dorsey is a funeral director in Clarksburg. He married Linda in 1970, and they adopted Jennifer 23 years ago, four days after she was born. They did not know that their new daughter had a birth defect, Prader-Willi Syndrome, which left her prone to seizures and limited her movement. Linda stays at home to care for her.

So aside from the trip to Orlando--taken when Jennifer was small, and her parents could carry her--the family was earthbound. The Dorseys would drive on vacations, mostly for short distances. But Bill never stopped talking about his dream of flight.

Then in May, a colleague introduced him to a travel agent who was attending a funeral. Maybe this guy could help him with that round-the-world idea.

Call my office, the agent said. Dorsey did, and he talked to Tanya, who went to work on the project. “She called me and gave me a price: $4,500,” Dorsey says. Too much.

Well, said Tanya, if he didn’t care about the route he took, she might be able to come up with something better. And she did: $1,858.90.

“Book it,” Dorsey said.

Linda didn’t know what to think. She too had thought that the trip would never happen. She feared for her husband’s safety, and didn’t share his vision. But he had denied himself so much over the years, and she knew how much he wanted to go.

“When he believes in something, he’ll go to the limit,” she says.

And so, at 4 p.m. on Aug. 8, Bill Dorsey boarded a McDonnell Douglas MD80 bound for Newark. Linda and Jennifer saw him off. Jennifer cried.

“I think she may have thought that her daddy was going to get on that plane and never come back,” Linda Dorsey says.

“I’m here and going like a dream. God I love it,” Dorsey wrote in the diary he kept.

He would take 63 pages of notes in the course of the next 2 1/2 days. Again and again, he would marvel at the rush of going up and coming down:

“Better than any carnival ride.”

“Super landing and smooth, exhilarating and great.”

“Wow. Fantastic.”

His notes are full of details. The flights from Amsterdam and Singapore, on Singapore Airlines and Eva Airways, offered more legroom than the flight from Pittsburgh; the headsets were free, as were all alcoholic beverages (although he doesn’t drink).

In Amsterdam for half an hour, he vomited (too much excitement, he believes). But he regained his equilibrium, and by the time the trip was over, he would put on three pounds.

Among other things, he ate:

Shrimp salad, sweet-and-sour pork, chicken, vegetables, pudding, rolls, fruit, yogurt, egg noodles, veal sausage, a cheese omelet, poached fish, potato, mushrooms, smoked salmon, peach crumble, ice cream and a piece of chocolate.

He appreciated the washcloths distributed after every meal.

He was offered CNN and dozens of choices of movies; he refused them all. “I could do that at home. I was going to make every minute count, and concentrate on the flight.”

So he followed the flight on the map that was beamed to the television screen on the seat in front of him. The plane crossed over Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Russia. It avoided Iranian and Iraqi airspace. It crossed Afghanistan, Pakistan, India.

When he flew over the South China Sea, he thought about the Vietnam War, and how the skies were full of fighters then.

When he passed over Japan, he thought of the atomic bomb.

Occasionally, he chatted with his seatmates. He struck up a conversation with a young woman from Australia; he asked her about funeral customs there, and she allowed as how they do some cremations, but they also bury a lot of people.

He saw a few sights from the air and from the airports: the Empire State Building and World Trade Center, the Himalayas and the Golden Gate Bridge. At Singapore’s airport, he toured the botanical gardens. Though he had a layover there of almost seven hours, he was not tempted to leave the airport. He was just too tired.

He wanted to sleep, but his mind wouldn’t let him. In the course of more than 60 hours in transit, he dozed for a little more than seven hours, he says. And in his exhaustion, he got a little paranoid.

“I may not get home. Air rage??? No one will come to my defense,” he wrote, en route to San Francisco. “Getting sleepy. Afraid to miss something and they might kill me if I close my eyes. I usually don’t sleep with one eye open.”

He wanted to go home.

And yet, there were moments when he knew it was all worthwhile.

On his way to San Francisco, he looked out the window and saw the first rays of sunrise--an orange glow, sweeping slowly across the black sky.

“Awesome. Beautiful. . . . Unbelievable. Unbelievable. . . . God is God,” he wrote.

A flight attendant twice asked him to pull down the shade, but he resisted. Everyone else on the plane was sleeping, and Dorsey couldn’t understand why they were not awake and staring out the window, transfixed as he was by the glory of the new day and by the snow-like clouds below.

He wished Linda and Jennifer were there to see it with him; he thought of his late father. Dorsey knew that this vision of creation was what his dad saw in heaven.

“I’ve never experienced anything like that,” Dorsey says. “I’ll never forget it.”

This is why he so wanted to make this trip. Sure, there was the 747-as-roller-coaster aspect of it; he loved the ups, the downs, the bank turns. But Bill Dorsey is a Christian man, and more than anything, he wanted to see the whole of God’s great creation, all at once.

“It’s enormous, amazing, such a beautiful world,” he says. “It’s just awesome to know how big the world is.”

The last leg of his voyage was bittersweet. “This is the last takeoff and landing for a while,” he wrote. “Not over flying, just facing reality about opportunities.” He knows that he will never again make a trip like this one, though maybe someday he will fly again.

The arrival in Pittsburgh would be tearful--Daddy, cried Jennifer, don’t do that again. He gave her a doll costumed in Asian dress; he gave Linda a gilded rose and a pewter vase.

Home at last, but still wired, he took a Tylenol PM and slept for eight hours. He awoke, used the bathroom and went to sleep for another eight hours, recovering from the hard work of flying around the world. His body was on the ground, but his spirit still soared.

“I will always remember,” he wrote, as he came in for his last landing.