If you're afraid of flying, you'd better start running

Commercial airplanes are dreadful. A bureaucratic, soulless way to fly. I don't deny they're the most common and even useful way to travel, nor that the State should have its flag carrier airline and its Air Forces, even if they run at a loss. What I mean is that, in general, airplanes are utter garbage. And their airports even more so, the worst place of all, a circus of inconveniences.

To start with, the number of people who travel for the day is marginal, so you always lug around luggage whose actual usefulness is a mystery. You drag the carry-on or wreck your back with the bag because you need to protect yourself for future days and nights, basically because you won't be at home or with your stuff, and above all because you don't have enough cash not to worry about running out of a jacket, sunscreen, or... cotton swabs? Really?

So for the airplane and the trip, we stock up on entertainment, clothes, consumables, and drugs, and all of that is extremely inconvenient to carry. Especially the drugs. Although with REPROCANN, flying with cannabis has been easier for a while now.

Filling a suitcase and having to check it in means losing the game against the airplane. But reducing everything to a small carry-on bag or backpack is also losing the game against the airplane. The first lesson of flying is that you'll always lose against the airplane. Still, it's fine. It's flying -- it's always going to be fine.

The first few minutes everything is new, a field of confirmations or refutations for an imaginary that culture implants in us from infancy (traveling by airplane). But after a short while the surprise fades and what appears is physical discomfort, forced coexistence with random people, bad and expensive food and drinks. Airplanes serve the worst presentation and temperature of Coca-Cola on the market.

Commercial flights: a stupid choreography

When I was a kid, in the early '90s, I lived for a few years in Santiago de Chile because of my old man's work (carpenter). That's how I first flew on a plane with my family, though I didn't register how incredible flying was until more than a decade later. But I always remembered the hot meals very well, my old man smoking, drinks on demand, free candy, free headphones and pins.

On the other hand, every trip by airplane I took as an adult -- all after the 2001 crisis and the fall of the Twin Towers -- was unbearable, despite not having gone through any dangerous moments and having paid for very few of them. For work or pleasure, I traveled to a fifth of the countries on the continent and a third of Argentina's provinces. I always had a terrible time.

Flying on commercial airplanes is frustrating, uncomfortable, and tedious. Everything there is to see and hear is torture. The choreographies are repeated ad infinitum: the dialogues, the consumables, and the protocols -- everything is hyper-processed and standardized. Besides, taking an airplane is always tense because the system drives you to be anxious, the deadlines are exaggerated, and the NPCs who board the plane with you get really stupid. Yes, you too.

And once up there, what you get is a supremely watered-down flight experience. A commercial airplane today is a simulator. Outside visibility is residual, accidental, marginal. It happens by chance, so to speak. Physically, if there's no turbulence or air pockets, you only feel a bit of vertigo in your chest and occasionally in your butt. Oh, but the discomfort in your feet and knees -- those show up on every flight longer than a few hours. I usually get off airplanes with the same feeling as when kids in the family try to grab toys from claw machines. The difference being that the airplane costs a whole lot more.

Light aircraft: the metal seams creak

The XS version of the airplane can, on the other hand, be very memorable. Last year I traveled with a press contingent to Cordoba to cover the Argentine final of Red Bull Batalla for El NO at Pagina|12. Among other things, freestylers and journalists got a baptism flight in a light aircraft over Uritorco and a gorgeous ridge area where Red Bull has a hangar and sponsors the Aeroatelier flight school. I walked a few meters ahead of the group to finish the joint and was the first to hear the pilot ask who wanted to ride as fake copilot. Pretty rapper vibes from the guys, but they hesitated and I rode up front.

Airplanes and light aircraft share, at different scales, the same panel or dashboard full of gadgets, packed with little thingamajigs. Like a large-scale synthesizer, with interfaces as primitive as they are effective: geoindicators, sonars, switches, sliders, knobs, and gizmos. Above all that, a light aircraft nose and a propeller that looks frozen. Beyond that, the future.

The sensation of suspension in your body is more intense in a light aircraft than in an airplane, partly because in terms of build they're a bit like being inside a car that took flight. The wind penetrates the metal seams, the light aircraft panels flap, blink, creak. The faux leather squeals a bit, and when the pilot pulls maneuvers, people squeal too.

Toward the end of the ride, the guy threw in a couple of ascents and freefall drops. Something 40 levels below what they did to Cordoba freestyle rapper Mecha for the Batalla promo, but still a buttery experience. The zero-gravity sensation is fascinating. It lasts just seconds, but there are commercial flights lasting hours and hours where not a single minute has that kind of spice.

Parachute: top tier aerial experience

Actually, I'd already had a previous experience in a light aircraft, to go skydiving near Chascomus. It might be an exaggeration -- this entire text is an exaggeration, in case you hadn't noticed -- but in that kind of light aircraft you reach the jump point more scared of staying up there, with the aircraft being battered by the wind and straining its engine, than of jumping into the void.

When you finally jump, there's a long stretch of that freefall where you don't remember the instructor strapped to you, or the light aircraft you jumped from, or the love of your life who was there with you. A zone of the mind activates that's reserved only for that situation, where your cheeks inflate like a pair of balloons. "This is the best thing in the world" followed by "I'm going to smash into a million pieces."

You fall at about 250 kilometers per hour, from around 4,000 meters up, for almost a minute. It must be among the top speeds a human body can reach without mechanical traction, through effort or gravity alone.

At a certain altitude, the instructor opens the parachute and you fly downward, chill, he throws in some tricks, and for a few more minutes -- could be 6 or 10 or 12 -- you descend looking at the green countryside, the pools, the little farms. And, beyond, a country that's absolutely unbelievable.

When you land, you take two steps and your legs buckle. Badly. You feel like vomiting. But vomiting from bitterness and vomiting from envy, because those guys and women who strap onto you do that every single day. Top tier of the aeronautical experience, the parachute.

Paragliding: the chairlift that took flight

Maybe somewhere in between all of this sits paragliding, which although it works on a different concept still feels like a kind of harness-swing for flying without a chassis.

There are baptism flights "in the countryside," which in Buenos Aires are done for example in San Antonio de Areco. In those cases, the paraglider is launched like a kite, using an ATV or a pickup truck, and you go up to about 500 meters in altitude. There the pilot unhooks it and takes you on a round of free flight that doesn't have many stunts to offer.

It's a ride. Like a chairlift, but with a piece of parachute above you. Like a roller coaster, but in slow motion. It's a little ride that brings a lovely sensation of freshness, and of a freedom that only comes from accepting how small you are. Along the way, you see fields, more fields, streams, herds of animals, road chaos, other fields, some chain-reaction crash, dogs humping in the field.

There are also "coastal" baptism flights, which in Buenos Aires are done for example around the cliffs of the beaches between Mar del Plata and Chapadmalal, but with self-propulsion via propeller and a more dynamic experience, with the waves as a soundtrack and people swarming on the sand, usually in the morning or near sunset. Cinema. Voyeur, beachy, high-flying cinema.

Flying is always going to be fine

That's it -- flying is always going to be fine. There are tons of options to do it. Commercial airplanes, the airline ones, fulfill a concrete need even though they carry an inconvenient and disappointing UX, for which state bureaucracy and especially people are also to blame, as every year they get dumber about traveling.

Luckily, we have parachute jumps, paragliding flights, and light aircraft stunts. We have those drugs, and there are many more highs up there. Helicopters. Military aircraft. The International Space Station. UFOs. Hot air balloons. Oh, hot air balloons.

Now fly out of here.