A Line From Georgia

The chime in Atlanta is the same as the chime everywhere else, but in Concourse E it sounds a little tired.

It was raining that afternoon on the ramp, the kind of rain that doesn't fall so much as hang in the air. Outside the window, a 777 sat with its wingtip light blinking red against the gray. Someone on the internet had asked which American city, besides the usual ones, once had a nonstop to Australia in the two thousands.

It is a good question because it assumes the map has always looked like it does now. LAX. San Francisco. Dallas. Honolulu, if you count it. New York, if you count a stop. The rest of the country travels to Australia by way of somewhere else.

But maps forget things.

For a brief period, you could board in Atlanta and get off in Sydney. Delta did it. December 2009. A 777LR, seventeen hours southbound, longer coming back. The flight left in the evening and crossed a line of date and season that most of us will never quite understand. You left winter and arrived in summer and somewhere over the Pacific you lost a Tuesday you were never using anyway.

There were others, if you stretch the definition of direct the way airlines do. Qantas had a flight number that started in New York and ended in Sydney, with a pause in Los Angeles where you stayed on board and pretended you were not in Los Angeles. Northwest once sold Detroit to Sydney as a single ticket with a change of gauge that felt like a promise. These were technicalities, but technicalities matter at 35,000 feet.

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What I remember about that era is not the routes themselves but the optimism that made them seem sensible. Fuel was cheaper, or at least it felt cheaper. Airplanes were getting longer legs. After 2001, every airline was looking for a place no one else had thought to go, a city pair that would make the globe feel smaller and more interesting.

An airline route is a strange kind of civic boast. It says: we are important enough to be connected to the other side of the world without interruption. Atlanta did not need Sydney, and Sydney did not need Atlanta, not really. But for a few months, someone in network planning thought the two places should be allowed to touch.

You see it now in the old timetables that circulate as PDFs among people who collect such things. The fonts are already dated. The flight numbers have since been reassigned to Atlanta to Tampa or Atlanta to Orlando. The airplane that did it now does something far more ordinary.

Most of us fly as if the current route map is natural law. We forget how provisional it all is. A nonstop appears because an executive got a good deal on an airplane, or because an airport offered to waive landing fees, or because a competitor blinked. Then it vanishes for the same reasons. The contrail fades a little faster than we expect.

I still look at the departure board in Atlanta when I have a long layover. Not for my flight. For the other places listed there, and for the places that used to be listed there and are not anymore.

The rain was still hanging there when they called boarding.