Rising From the Ashes: The Flight Magazine is Not Completely Dead Yet

Many years ago some intrepid birdwatchers in the U.S. spotted an ivory-billed woodpecker in some remote swamp in the South.  This spotting occurred a couple decades after the species was declared extinct. However, spottings the past several years have failed to materialize and the ivory-billed woodpecker might be declared permanently extinct after all.

The airline flight magazine has been as elusive a species the last couple years as the ivory-billed woodpecker.  I haven't spotted one since early 2020.  But today, for the first time in over two years, a flight magazine showed up in my seat pocket.  Shockingly enough, this magazine is the publication of Lion Air, a definitely low-budget Indonesian airlines that one wouldn't expect to produce a flight magazine, even during the healthiest times.

Of course, I enthusiastically grabbed my copy from the seat pocket and took it with me, though all the articles were written in Indonesian and the copy itself, torn and wrinkled, appeared as though a few hundred people had thumbed through it during its lifetime. But as is the case with all flight magazines, I derive some bit of pleasure studying the airline route map, as the geography of airlines and maps in general have always fascinated me.

At least there are no crossword puzzles in Lionmag, as one of my pet peeves in life are those evil bastards who fill in half of the airline magazine crossword puzzle and then put the magazine back in the seat pouch, rendering the puzzle and the magazine frustratingly useless for the next passenger, especially because half of their dimwitted puzzle entries are totally wrong.  Over the years, I've encountered this selfish behavior with increasing frequency and, the half-filled-in flight magazine puzzle, for me, has been just another indicator that goodwill and civil behavior in society is vanishing.

I will probably leave my copy of Lionmag here in my hotel room when I check out, because like a three-year-old child, I can only look at the pictures and can't understand any of the text.  But like a sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker, this return of the flight magazine somehow made me feel better today, causing me to harbor a faint hope that this might be an omen that the world might possibly be returning to something resembling normal, but like the last viewing of that elusive woodpecker, it's more likely a false alarm.




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