FlightPath3D, The Only Travel Buddy I Need

Bones jiggled by turbulence, brain numbed via SkyMall, nose twitchy with the smell of my neighbor’s peanut breath and secret farts, I am lost. My hand reaches for my lone salvation, a ladybug-sized nub on the armrest labeled map. The little seat-back screen lights up with a fetching 3D rendering of our plane—there’s me and you, Gail the gassy librarian, in row 27!—gliding over a bumpy, russet and tawny patch of Wamsutter, Wyoming. We are 36,572 feet up, traveling at 197 degrees due west-southwest at 542 miles an hour. Rejoice, for I am found.

FlightPath3D, you confection of cartography, code, and cartoonery, the only travel buddy I need. I zoom in, and—courtesy of crowdsourced reviews in ecstatic cahoots with the GPS—greater Wamsutter beckons: At the Dusty Trail Cafe, Sheryl S.’s companion, one George, “had the Elvis Presley French toast … to die for!!!!” I envy this man-hero and his suicidally good breakfast. Soon I’m over the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, thinking about an alternative life as a park ranger. The airplane animation transforms me from foggy midflight nobody into myriad adventuresome somebodies: explorer, maverick, anthropologist with God’s-eye view of his eternal subject, humanity.

I become even more: The display invites me to consider material reality as no other modern screen can. When I’m told it’s minus 74 degrees outside, my ice-cold ginger ale transubstantiates, a fizzy nip of a distant storm cloud. Then there’s the geolocation. Knowing one’s exact place in the world frees one to contemplate one’s place in the world. Even the glitches, the misfires beside “Origin” and “Destination” of UNKNOWN UNKNOWN, prompt me to ask: Where am I going? Where have I been?

In the beginning—think back—we sat in ignorance from takeoff to landing (unless the pilot wished to edify us over the intercom). In the ’80s, we received an ETA screen, the world’s most maddening download bar. Then came a 2D GPS feed, a blue blip blooping its way over a white landscape, like a Looney Tunes treasure map, cute, reassuring. But only now have we reached a new heaven: 3D satellite map, destination guide, cockpit view, a live camera feed from the plane’s nose, even instructions for baggage pickup. All in service of that most exalting technology of all, flight.

Watching Paddington 2, it’s easy to forget. But witnessing the speedometer shoot from 356 to 583, the altimeter from 16,000 to 41,000, reminds me that, yes, we pigs really can fly—that I and this 900,000-pound winged canteen are traversing a continent of lakes, canyons, mountains, millions upon millions of ranchers and accountants, Sheryl S. and her satiated friend. Suddenly, complaining about legroom seems deranged. Instead, I want to turn to the window and, like Harper Pitt in Angels in America, tell the sky, “Nothing’s lost forever. In this world there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.”

This article was originally published in Wired and can be viewed here.