I am trying to figure this out. Have I always hated to fly? Or do I hate it incrementally more, year by year, day by day?

Other questions I am pondering:

Has claustrophobia always been an issue, or is it worse than it was? And is it about the flying itself, or the fact that planes are likely to have fewer empty seats these days?

Planes are not getting smaller. I am not getting bigger. But more people are sitting (uncomfortably) in the same space. That is the source of this, I do believe.

Commercial aircraft skins: I was not quite sure of what they are made of till I just looked it up … and they are mostly aluminum. (I had preferred to think it was titanium; I mean, listen to that word titanium! That has to be strong, right? But aluminum?)

Most of us know aluminum from the liquid cans we can crush in our fists … but I haven’t even really processed that yet, the notion of this fragile tube with hundreds of people inside and the only thing separating us from the frigid air of 35,000 feet are those three or four centimeters (1.5 inches or less) of aluminum.

I can attest that my capacity for being OK with flying (forget enjoying it) is spiraling downward. It is less now than a year ago, and it was less then than the year before that.

It could come down to stuffed planes, and airlines seeming to look for that financial panacea of every … single … seat being filled.

Seems to me, when a person feels other people all around them,  one inches in front and inches behind, and on either side, and across the aisle, and seemingly no one can move unless everyone else does … that perhaps is a legitimate source of discomfort, real and imagined.

But, then, I am beginning to think that madness is a continuum that can be represented on a graph by a line sloping steadily down towards “barking mad”. From adulthood to the grave, we gradually lose it. (Or perhaps we eventually just know too much; we know all the things that could go wrong.)

We probably are crazier right now, all of us, than we ever were before. And the older we get, the more issues we have in our heads, as well as our bodies.

But air travel does, in fact, suck. And it sucks more now than it did before, even if I am nuttier now than I was then.

It was not as bad a thing, 20 years ago. Even if planes crashed a bit more often, Way Back When. The thing is, back then, you were less likely to be crammed between other people when you plunged into the ocean.

That makes a difference. It really does.

I took two longish flights in returning from Barcelona to Abu Dhabi, and they were not terrible — as they had been going the other direction 17 days before.

And why was that? Because I could see empty seats on both eastbound flights. On one of those flights, I even moved to the the “window” (no actual window, but against the side of the plane) of an exit row — and I could extend my feet!

Anyway, maybe all of us … not just the old crazies … have to steel ourselves a bit to climb inside those aluminum tubes. And hope like hell 1) no one sits in the middle seat or 2) you come into enough wealth to fly business.