Dear internet, I went on a plane this week for the first time in my 31 years of life.

It was AWESOME. Mate’s stag do in Spain, went to Benidorm for 5 days as ye do. Great time. Lemme tell you things about planes you already know though.

Firstly, don’t forget you have a bottle of liquid in your suitcase. It really makes the jobsworths at the airport go full ham on the searching.. no wait that sounds invasive. (Just to bear in mind all of this is coming from a 31 year old white male so I’m aware I probably got off easy) It makes them go almost full ham. Sir open up all of your stuff and that. It was a bottle of hair style paste stuff that blipped the scanners. Oops.

Airport experience in note form

  • If you do carry liquid with you, remember you’ve got it
  • Toothpaste is a liquid
  • Hair styling paste is a liquid
  • 100ml is a dumb limit
  • You’ll have to put it all in one of their silly little plastic bags
  • If you have a vape they’re going to want you to detach the liquid bit
  • It’s gonna leak all over the inside of the bag
  • You’re only allowed 1 of their clear plastic bags. Splitting it amongst two or even three bags would be too easy
  • Don’t carry any liquid, you’re better off just buying it fresh later
  • Literally 5 seconds after going through the scanner you can buy everything you wanted to take in sizes bigger than 100ml anyway
  • Nobody else will ever look at the plastic bag you’ve just spent 10 minutes faffing with

Ooh speaking of scanners, Fox saw inside me.. Also not in an invasive way. Apparently my hip pin and leg plate lit up like a Christmas tree on the body scanner, pretty cool. Little bit creepy.

Airplanes? No worries. Taxiing just feels like you’re in a coach or something. When you go to take off picture that one friend you don’t like to ride in their car because they abuse the accelerator - it’s like that except they’ve got an engine that can go 0 to 200 in a few seconds. Expect it to be loud, not scary loud but definitely big-ass-engine loud.

Take a look out the window for the moment you go through the clouds, that’s pretty cool. I had no idea clouds were mostly at the same relative height, once you pop out of them you’re just straight up above them all. In your face, gravity!

Once you’ve done that just sort of look out the window and ignore the flight crew selling you tat for 3 hours (it was a Ryanair flight, probably different elsewhere). I did have one weird moment of “Hey where are the town names”… yeah.. Brain fart.

Landing feels like how your stomach goes weightless when you go over a bit of a sharp hill in a car - it’ll do that a few times then you’ll come in to land. If you’re a bit worried I’d recommend not looking out the window for the landing, I did though because it was cool to see. You see the ground coming up pretty gently honestly then there’s a bit of a bump when you touch down. There’s a bit of super braking and you feel like you’re being pulled forward out of the seat (ah that’d be why they want the belts on and the tables in the upright position then)

You cut about a bit on the runway and taxiways like a coach again and then you’re done. Repeat the experience on your way home.

Course you already knew this having not spent the first 30 years of your life not being on planes :)