Look out below!

I live in the flight path to the Providence airport. And I don't mean simply that my house is under the super-skyway. When the prevailing winds blow, the incoming planes are on their final heading, ready to hit the runway. I can't exactly wave at individual passengers, but I sure can see the cracks in the planes' doors.

And hopefully, no other cracks. Now I learn that Southwest Airlines has been flying their cheery blue and red birds over my house all day, and some of them might have been short a few pin feathers.

Southwest has been my airline of choice; I was so thrilled when they started flying into Denver. That meant I didn't have to trek up to Logan for a JetBlue experience if I wanted to fly right and save money. This, despite some 737 suspicion, based not so much on the widespread problems they had a few years ago, but on that convertible model that Aloha Airlines landed in Maui in 1988.

When I lived in Honolulu, I flew Aloha all the time. All their planes were painted with the names of Hawaiian monarchs, and that craft was named Queen Lili`uokalani. When the Aloha accident happened, I kind of lived it somatically, relating the footage of the plane landing, top stripped off like the lid on a can of sardines, passengers with their hair flying.

How many times had I flown on the Queen Lili`u? Landed right there in Kahului? With a bit less draft in the cabin.

One time I got stuck on a prop jet between Kahului and Honolulu. It was noisy, closer to the sea, and it took forever to get from OGG to HNL. So long that the flight attendants were passing out free drinks. There was plenty of time to think of the safety record of commuter jets.

This particular flight informs my every viewing of LOST, by the way.

So. In the past few years, I had kind of gotten over my 737 suspicions. You get into your 50s, you know you're going to die anyway, you don't worry so much and you don't try to game the system. Welcome aboard.

I love flying and I think back fondly to those days in the 1970s, when all the Aloha jets had lots of legroom, and facing seats, like on a train, at all the emergency exits. Back when my Hawaii friends used to travel in packs to visit each other and visit the outer islands. When those departing or arriving would get sent off or greeted by the rest of us with ukuleles and leis.

I guess it still doesn't bother me to fly on a 737, even after the Southwest Crack-a-thon. But where I live, I can hear the engines reverse thrust exactly 120 seconds after an incoming plane's shadow darkens my lawn. In good weather, I can sometimes hear the screech of the tires hitting the tarmac.

And when I'm working in the garden this spring, I'll be looking up and thinking about it.