u/East-Cheesecake-7944

For a while, I worked for a tech company for which I often had to travel to Seattle. Important to this anecdote is the fact that when flying from San Francisco to the Pacific Northwest, Alaska Airlines tends to be the only reasonable choice. Over the years, I have flown them many many times - I would typically fly to Seattle on a Monday evening, and back on Thursday after work.

It was one such mundane Thursday at the Seattle-Tacoma airport - a bunch of socially awkward Amazon and Microsoft engineers/ product managers heading home or kickstarting a long weekend trip. Everyone is in Patagucci and no one is making eye contact with anyone let alone their spouses, far less their screaming children. The TSA PreCheck and Clear lines are longer than the general screening lines. The millennials can’t wait to get to the other side and start drinking. The management consultants are also here, flying back to their home offices, probably after presenting a hundred and twenty slides on how to squash whistleblowers at the Boeing factory. All indicators that the world is in perfect, boring equilibrium.

I board the aircraft and nick a hand sanitizer wipe from the basket in the galley, one of only two things free in economy (the other being a choice of pretzels or Biscoff). I know I will forget to use the wipe by the time I get to my seat; in fact it will sit unopened in the seat pocket alongside the last guy’s calcified wad of gum. The cabin is quiet, other than the shuffling of luggage and the grumbling flight attendant on the PA asking “guests to please clear the aisles to enable on-time departure”. Everyone has AirPods in their ears, so the flight attendant is really just talking to the skies. Soon enough, people have settled in and whipped out their phones to check game scores and/ or stock prices. The overhead bins have been closed and the ground staff has located the final passenger who was sitting in their seat all along but had somehow been missed in all five headcounts. The pilot comes in on the PA for the pre-departure address - all business as usual (or BAU as the techies like to say). He says the standard “a flying time of blah blah, expected arrival at la di da”, but ends with an odd “be excellent to each other”. It makes me look up, as if by doing so, I will be able to see the pilot’s face, or maybe Keanu Reeves’s co-actor in that random movie.

About two weeks later, I read this article in The Times about a pilot who regularly flies this sector, and had taken the jumpseat in the cockpit to fly back home to SF - except that he happened to be tripping on shrooms and basically tried to cut out the fuel supply and shut off the engines after the plane had departed from Tacoma and was well in the air. The article went on to say that “To passengers, he often had this message: “Be excellent to each other.”“