https://www.newyorker.com/humor/shouts-murmurs/what-a-nervous-flier-hears

Good morning, ladies and gentleman.

This is your underpaid, overworked, and quite possibly going-through-a-divorce captain speaking, looking up from the game on my phone for two minutes to welcome you aboard this non-stop flight from Denver, Colorado, to Orlando, Florida. Our ground team has finished making their whirring, clicking, and loud sawing noises, and the shoeless man screaming about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails has been forcefully removed from the cabin, so that means we have completed our pre-flight preparations and we will be pushing back from the gate shortly.

Before we depart, I’d like to introduce to you our award-losing flight team—we have Jess and Tomas up in first class, with the secret parachutes, and we have Gerome and Lucille in back, with what we like to call the "living cargo." I am proud to say that every attendant on board has been triple-certified in the ability to present a completely neutral facial expression, unreadable at all times, in order to give you absolutely zero indication whether whatever is happening is normal or not.

Up here in the flight deck, I am assisted by First Officer Bentley, with whom I have irreconcilable workplace tension.

Our flight time—the time during which we will be hurtling through the sky, suspended midair, spitting in the face of God’s natural laws—will be approximately three hours and forty-five minutes.

We’re expecting a few bumps during takeoff as we pass over the Rockies, then a few more bumps as we traverse a thousand violent unending storms fuelled by climate change, and then some additional bumps as we make our final descent through an active hurricane and into Orlando. So, in other words, severe bumps wall-to-wall. But don’t worry! Never in the history of modern aviation has a commercial flight been brought down by standard turbulence. That being said—you, the one listening to this, are a special and unique snowflake, consistently defying norms and conventions both big and small, so who knows! This could be your unlucky day.

When we do experience rough air, please remain in your seat with your seatbelt fastened. And, if anyone stands up to use the bathroom while the seatbelt sign is on, please remember to think to yourself, Well, if anything happens to them, they deserve it for breaking the rules.

As we now taxi out to the runway, it’s looking like we are sixty-eighth in line for takeoff, so please remain highly stressed and vigilant, as if our departure could occur at any second, for the next two hours, minimum. In the meantime, we have activated our in-flight entertainment system, as well as our complimentary Wi-Fi, for your enjoyment. If you’re having trouble accessing these services throughout the flight, please keep in mind that this entertainment-system failure is a telltale sign of a system-wide malfunction, affecting the wings most severely. As they say in the Air Force, "If you can’t stream ‘We Bought a Zoo,’ starring Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson, you are literally moments away from an irreversible nosedive."

I will now take a moment to thank our Gold Star Travellers for joining us today, and also to remind all of you that you are not in control. In fact, you’re never in control. Not in the air, not on land, not even at sea. No matter where you are, and no matter how much comfort you tend to extract from the self-delusion that you are safe because you are "at the wheel," please take a moment to acknowledge that it is all a lie, and that there is no "wheel" to be "at" in the first place. You may think you are the sole pilot of your destiny, evading the encroaching clouds of chaos through color-coded spreadsheets, but, in fact, your fate is completely beyond your field of view, and utterly intertwined with the fates of others. So please take this opportunity to trust in the aggregate goodness and competence of your fellow human beings, because, in the end, you’ll never be able to escape the beautiful, infuriating uncertainty inherent in bumping up against other people.

Unless, of course, you qualify for our highly exclusive Platinum status, and then you can ignore all this—it no longer applies to you.

I’ll now leave you to Google things like "Orlando turbulence forecaster" and "what model plane did that door fly off of again." When you’re done with that, I invite you to sit back, relax, and enjoy your in-flight experience with us, the airline you trust most, because the color scheme of the branding reminds you of the company that makes your body wash.

We’re glad you’ve chosen to fly with us today, and we hope to make your flight as pleasant and comfortable as possible.

And even if we don’t crash, please remember: you could still get COVID. Welcome aboard. ♦