AirLines-tickets

There is a good chance that you’ll never ever understand what individual aircraft engine parts actually do, or what all those little gauges mean in the cockpit. Or those flaps on the wings, they slow you down, right? Let’s face it: you have no idea what anything on an airplane actually does, we just hope that they all work together so that you’re able to get to from point A to point B at the time listed on the ticket. It’s kind of funny that we put so much trust into complex machines like airplanes when we barely know how they work.

As a society we have a tendency to be willfully ignorant about how or why things work. We don’t really take the time to learn how an airplane stays up in the air, but instead just put our trust into simple physics that we will stay up long enough in the air to get to Cleveland, or wherever we are going. It’s the old idea that we would rather just eat the sausage instead of figure out how it’s made, because to do that would be terrifying.

Not that figuring out how an airplane stays in the air is terrifying or anything like that, it just takes us away from the idea that a flight at 30,000 feet is merely humdrum. If you look at an aircraft as just one large machine with wings and an engine, it’s much easier to trust that everything will go swimmingly. It’s when you start to think about how thousands of parts must work in perfect synchronicity that you begin to get a bit uneasy. Think about it: most planes don’t crash because the wings just fall off- they crash because of a mechanical failure. It’s the little things that make all the difference.

The good thing is that we have gotten to a place where if we don’t want to think about it we don’t have to. It’s the reason why airlines employ thousands of well trained, well educated experts to make sure that everything stays in perfect shape. The good thing about having so many parts in an airplane is that chances are one part stalling or malfunctioning won’t cause an issue because there are so many back up parts that something will take over. So while you’re sitting in your seat drinking a diet soda and reading the newest Patterson book, thousands of man hours are making sure that you make it to your destination not only in time, but also in one piece.