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By Root 1232 0

Is it fifty stories high? Maybe. One of the skyscrapers along the beach is Boston’s Prudential Center (though clearly this is not Boston because all of the other towers are unrecognizable totems), and the track’s peak is about the same height as the Prudential. But the descent doesn’t go all the way back to earth, to the gently rolling waves. If the vertical climb is fifty stories, the drop is only twenty-five. Then the track angles up again, but the pitch is gentle, no more then five degrees. This is, you understand, the runway. A chain lift locked into the bottom of your plane will pull you along the surface of the water and up to the peak of the camelback. Then, like it would a roller-coaster car, gravity will send your plane plummeting down the other side, the antirollback locks disengaged. You will be traveling two hundred miles an hour, your engines will click on and you will feel the plane hurtling along this runway track in the sky. And then you will be flying, leaving the edge of the track as if it were the end of an aircraft carrier. This is how you take off. You watch a 737 do it. Then a CRJ. Then an Airbus. Then another CRJ. It’s beautiful the way these planes are launched. They leave the track roughly thirty stories in the air, turn right into the departure corridor, and grow smaller and smaller as they disappear into a soft blue sky, an egg-colored setting sun in the distance. And then it is your turn. The tower has cleared you, and so you inform your passengers and flight crew that you are number one for takeoff.

You sit straight in your seat, your hands on the yoke, and feel the plane lurching forward, jerking just like a roller-coaster car at first, and then you are climbing up the track. The plane rests at the summit for a second or two, the tower says go, the antirollback struts slip away, and the nose of your aircraft dips. And then you are rumbling down the far side of the track, the passengers behind you screaming—but not in terror, in delight, because this is, apparently, the tradition in this particular aviation culture. You have the feeling their hands are over their heads.

When you hit the bottom—and the start of that gently angled runway itself—your engines kick on. On the instrument panel you can see the turbines are spinning. All good. And then, a moment later, you are flying, angling into the departure corridor high over this bay and getting clearance from the tower to climb to five thousand feet. And there isn’t a bird in sight. Delightful.

But this is a dream, and do your dreams ever end well? Not these days. A flight attendant knocks on the door, and even though you are in the midst of your initial climb, you unbuckle your harness and see what he needs. He is a young man and his face is colorless. You walk into the first-class cabin and gaze at the floor where he is pointing: This plane seems to have a long row of baseboard heaters along the floor, and what is occurring is most visible before the feet of the passengers in the first row—the bulkhead seats—but is happening the entire length of the plane. Waves of what looks like woodstove or fireplace ash are spewing from the grates on both sides of the jet, rolling from the openings like lava and coating the floor and the feet of the passengers.

Meanwhile, the plane continues to climb, though there is no one on the flight deck piloting the aircraft, and you and the flight attendant conjecture amiably about the location of the fire. You seem to believe that the blaze must be out, because this is ash and it doesn’t seem to be causing the passengers any pain, so it must be cool. But then the plane begins to dive. Not only is it not climbing—or even gliding—it is plummeting, almost nose down. And so you leave the flight attendant to see if you can prevent the aircraft from breaking the surface of the water like an Olympic diver.

You climb into the captain’s seat on the flight deck and pull the yoke back as hard and fast as you can, and instantly the plane starts to rise; you hit the vertex of the parabola, the very bottom of the U, and you