I’ve been traveling a lot recently, and I’m here to report that a worrying tendency has taken hold among my fellow Americans. We are turning our gaze away from the world, looking inward, not with introspection but for the pleasures of escapism, choosing to live in the dark as reality races by outside our window.
I am speaking, of course, about the way people keep closing their window blinds when they fly. It’s not a very big window; more of a porthole, really. But I’ll be damned if generations of aerospace engineers pierced the jet fuselage with all these pressure-resistant acrylic panels so I could watch Chicago, instead of, you know, see Chicago. Preferably as it rises, wreathed in mist, from Lake Michigan.
And yet that is what more and more travelers are doing as airplane norms shift from open skies to closed blinds. This is especially prevalent behavior on longer flights, but has also become the custom for some travelers even during taxi, takeoff, and landing. To them, I say: Let there be light!
You will see the ballet of the tarmac workers, parks and lakes you never knew existed, patterns of development and infrastructure, customs of land ownership, and finally, the lines of the earth itself. You will see what journalist and pilot James Fallows has called “the logic of the American landscape”—why towns, factories, and cities are where they are. And if you ever have the opportunity to fly on the evening of July Fourth, you will see the whole dark country sparkle with fireworks like a vast chocolate birthday cake. If you’re planning to spend the flight in quiet reflection, eschewing the lure of watching, listening, and even reading, the earth is the perfect companion.
But also, you’re about to be propelled through the sky in a tin can at 600 miles per hour. Aren’t you a little curious?
Many airlines do ask for passengers to raise their shades during takeoff and landing. It’s the best part of the flight, view-wise, but it’s also the riskiest part of the flight. “It can be important for passengers to react quickly,” Janet Northcote, communications head for the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, explains. “This is easier if their eyes are already used to the light outside the aircraft. In addition, flight attendants want to have an unobstructed view of the outside during takeoff and landing—for example, to identify problems with the engines. In an emergency, they can then identify more quickly which side passengers can be evacuated from. Rescue workers can also assess the situation inside more quickly from the outside and see, for example, whether there is a fire in the aircraft.” If you see something, like a gas leak on a Boeing preparing for takeoff, say something!
Still, in the U.S. and Europe, this is an operational procedure, not a regulation. And one that is less and less in force on U.S. airlines. (United, for example, officially dropped the policy in 2022.)
After you’re in the air, the likelihood of having an open window shade drops minute by minute. These days, some flight crews on longer trips request passengers close the shades so others may sleep. On newer planes, they can enforce a dark cabin through electronic window tints that can be darkened plane-wide. All of these developments come in concert with a new breed of seatback TVs, whose solid picture quality and terrific movie selection are as far from the one-movie model of the ’90s as the A380 is from the Wright Flyer.
Those who breach this dim sanctum for an up-close view of the clouds will find themselves in disputes with the window DJs around them, as if looking outside was as disrespectful as putting your seat back (which, obviously, you are always entitled to do).
To be sure, directing young people to stop watching television and look out the window is such a hackneyed grown-up scold it would be overwrought coming from the dad in Calvin and Hobbes. But for once, it is not young people who are the problem—kids, in this case, still recognize that flying is cool. Adults, on the other hand …
Former Slate editor-in-chief Julia Turner, who has previously broached this topic on the Culture Gabfest, marveled at the apparent nonchalance of the nation’s fliers. “The default should be ‘Holy shit, we’re in the sky, get a load of that,’ ” she observed. Icarus drowned, and you aren’t even looking at the waves. A splash quite unnoticed.
The irony is that the same digital media revolution that has made it so attractive to fly with the blinds closed has also made it that much more interesting to fly with them open. Sophisticated in-flight maps can show you exactly what you’re looking at. (N.B.: Those weird folded mountains are the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians.) Plus, with a decent smartphone, you can take some pretty good airplane window photos. It’s good to have something to remember the trip.
