Tiny plane, big state

You can fly to a forest, kind of.

Welcome to this month’s issue of Pennsylvania: The Newsletter. Pennsylvania summer is delivering: Since I last wrote, I’ve visited a snake hunt, a music festival headlined by an Amish-themed cover band, a track-side hotel designed specifically for railroad enthusiasts and like 12 different, totally gorgeous branches of Sheetz.

I’m kicking it back to Memorial Day Weekend for this issue, though, with a dispatch from Bradford Regional Airport. I have a story out in The Baffler this week about taking a small plane whilst knowing too much about the FAA and grappling with my weakening distrust in American institutions :) Sadly, however, The Baffler’s readership includes non-Pennsylvanians, which means I wasn’t able to dive into the particulars of flying over Western PA the way I would have liked to. What follows is more pertinent information for Pennsylvania enthusiasts.

One moronic thing I did this spring was drink three coffees and pitch a story in which I take a small plane to test the therapy techniques I’d learned in my fear of flying course. I suffer from a pretty bad fear of flying, and I’d already been considering doing this. Plus I grew up near a small airport, so I thought I knew what I was getting into when I booked a flight to Pittsburgh from Bradford, PA. The BRAD-PITT flight was $40 and 45 minutes long and leaving from near my in-laws’ house and I thought, this plane is flying into Pittsburgh International Airport, how tiny can it be? Y’all,

Obviously, there are people who fly these sorts of planes all the time, and possibly even enjoy the experience. I, on the other hand, recently forked over $250 for a series of fear of flying seminars on a website that looks like it’s been designed on Microsoft Paint. The gist of my article is that my experience is increasingly common; I’m just one of many nervous people. For example: I was getting my hair cut a couple months back, blabbing to my hairdresser about my aerophobia, when the woman next up for the salon chair said she also had fear of flying so bad she’d seen a therapist about it. Her therapist told her to drive to Pittsburgh’s airport and watch planes take off and land, but she said it hadn’t helped her much, and she still felt like she had to puke every time she was on a plane. She asked if I had that symptom too, and I said — because the hair salon is a sacred space for exchanging truths between women — “honestly, I’m more afraid that I’ll shit myself.”

I say this to convey the headspace I’m in on planes, which is bad. I also think that if I weren’t such a freak I’d have had a great time on this flight. It was the most beautiful time of year (early summer) and we got to fly over the most beautiful nation on Earth (Pennsylvania). Southern Airways, whose whole business is ferrying small groups of passengers between tiny airports and larger, regional ones, has good customer service and comfy seats. If I were 40% braver — or, perhaps, you? — I might even be tempted to check out another leg. This is the Eastern region of Southern Airways’ route map.

Imagine it: You could go from Pittsburgh to Dubois to Washington to Williamsport back to Washington to Lancaster to Pittsburgh to Bradford. Or you could go from Williamsport to Washington to Bradford to Pittsburgh to Lancaster to Washington again to Dubois. You could do Bradford to Washington to Dubois to Pittsburgh to Lancaster to Washington to Williamsport. Bradford Regional, though, has to be the best destination. It’s right by the prison where Wesley Snipes was held for tax evasion, for one. Plus you can’t usually fly to places like National Forests, given they are definitionally off grid. But when we took off from Bradford, civilization was hardly visible; it was just miles and miles of trees blanketing the hills. I’ve spent a lot of time in that forest, but there’s no better way to comprehend its scale than from above, where it looks like it goes on forever.

I was thinking about this the other night at bar trivia. My team was in first place, flying toward victory, when the host asked which president established the national parks system. We felt pretty good about Teddy Roosevelt — turns out, that lost us the night, and four Jagermeister-drinking regulars who are rumored to be Carnegie Mellon professors defeated us when they said Woodrow Wilson. I went home and looked this up later, and guess what was established under Teddy? The U.S. Forest Service. This part of PA wasn’t designated a national forest until 1923 (Coolidge time) but the general sentiment I’m cruising toward is still relevant: Public land is a great thing about America, and like all great things about America, it now feels dated and under threat.

That concludes our politicohistorical aside. After our plane passed the national forest, we flew over small towns in the Western PA countryside. I can’t believe how many looked like Oz, clean and even shiny from above, sitting along baby blue rivers. Obviously the beauty is season-dependent — this whole state will look like a bag of sticks in November — but look at this motherfucking fairytale:

This is Brady’s Bend, named for Captain Samuel Brady, who in 1779 sought to rescue a settler and her children who had allegedly been captured by Seneca and Munsee people in the area and wound up killing their leader. Pretty!

Even Pittsburgh looked cute as we approached, hovering low above Raccoon Creek State Park before entering suburbia. Of course, I was in no headspace to enjoy this — at one point I could literally overhear the pilots bitching about wind shear as they looked at radar on what appeared to be an iPad — but I’m able to imaginatively reconstruct what could have been a very cool trip when I scroll through the photos I took. I want you, the fine readers of Substack’s only Pennsylvania-specific travel newsletter, to know that this fun and weird opportunity exists.

After I took this flight, I watched The Rehearsal, the zeitgeisty show in which comedian Nathan Fielder constructs elaborate sets to role play goofy scenarios. This season’s focus is aviation safety, and one of Fielder’s reconstructed sets is a replica of a terminal in Houston’s airport. Imagine my surprise when, a few weeks later, Pittsburgh International announced a rehearsal of its own. The airport is seeking locals who are willing to participate in a staged run-through ahead of its new terminal opening. Anyone can sign up for Trial Day, wherein airport staff will issue participants a “boarding pass” before they “go through security” and “scan Real IDs.” I signed up, obviously. I look forward to reporting back on the experience.