On Flying: Why Getting High Wouldn’t Be So Dope After All

Begin­ning of discussion.

It is only nat­ural for humans to want to fly. The human desire to move beyond the laws of grav­ity and take to the skies is the busi­ness of all pilots, astro­nauts and moti­va­tional speak­ers who talk in metaphors. And there are many more of us who would like to make it our busi­ness. Most of us have, at point or another, wished for the abil­ity to fly with­out the use of planes, rock­ets or super-strength spider-webbing. As chil­dren you may have actu­ally tried to fly, run­ning around the back­yard and attempt­ing to ‘take off’. And, unless you were Peter Parker, you would have frus­trat­ingly remained grounded. Nev­er­the­less, many of us con­tinue to dream about fly­ing and still wish for the power to zoom about in the air.

But I don’t believe that fly­ing would be such a fan­tas­tic thing. Sure, you would get that instant feel­ing of free­dom as your feet left the ground and you watched the world shrink under your shoes; but things would get bad pretty quickly after that.

For one, it would be cold. Really cold. The first layer of the Earth’s atmos­phere is called the Tro­pos­phere and it stretches from the ground up to around ten kilo­me­tres above sea level. So assum­ing you did sud­denly one day acquire the abil­ity to fly, you would find your­self soar­ing around in the Tro­pos­phere – which might sound like a mid-air amuse­ment park, but is actu­ally a place that gets 6.5° Cel­sius colder for every kilo­me­tre higher you go. Plus the faster you flew the more the wind chill fac­tor would increase and you’d prob­a­bly have to put a wind­cheater on. And you would soon encounter clouds, which are the bitu­men of heaven in car­toons but in real­ity would prob­a­bly be more like walk­ing into a meat locker wear­ing noth­ing but eat­able ice-cream undies. You would very soon be miss­ing your warm bed blan­kets. And pos­si­bly your toes, should frost­bite set in.

Then there would be the issue of fly­ing posi­tions. Fly­ing in itself is a glam­orous thing and you could expect to gain extra ‘cool’ once air­borne (unless you are wear­ing that wind­cheater, of course). The fly­ing process would involve you shoot­ing up into the air ‘ele­va­tor style’ (i.e. head first) and then mov­ing your­self into the ‘super­man posi­tion’ (i.e. par­al­lel to the ground with fists out in front). Except that it prob­a­bly wouldn’t work out that way. You would still be bound by the laws of grav­ity in the Tro­pos­phere and get­ting into the ‘super­man posi­tion’ – let alone main­tain­ing it – would be almost impos­si­ble. Most likely you’d end up fly­ing in a posi­tion that resem­bled a child hang­ing over a fence on its stom­ach, except with­out the fence.

As I demon­strate here…

…this would not be a glam­orous way to fly.

How­ever, the most com­pelling rea­son not to go fly­ing is that it is – in fact – ille­gal for a per­son to go fly­ing.  All things that fly – planes, bal­loons, blimps, even hang glid­ers – need licences to do so. The Civil Avi­a­tion Safety Author­ity (CASA) rules the skies in Aus­tralia and they basi­cally ensure that no one goes up into the sky with­out the CASA know­ing about it. Since radars are already capa­ble of show­ing birds in flight, detect­ing a human in the sky would be sim­ple enough. Espe­cially if said human was fly­ing in the shape of a child hang­ing over a fence.

And so you see the dan­gers, dis­com­forts and fash­ion per­ils of human-only flight. It is not my inten­tion to ruin child­hood dreams, but we must let go of that desire to fly. Move on.There are other things that need now to be con­sid­ered. Like how can we make our­selves invis­i­ble? Or how can we imbue our­selves with X-Ray vision? And do peo­ple who sell trench coats on the black mar­ket keep their ille­gal trench coats on the insides of their trench coats?

End of dis­cus­sion (unless you would like to leave your own thoughts On Fly­ing below).