transport: aeroplanes

my parents told me just before i went on my first plane ride that elephants flew behind the plane, pushing it along (Dumbo) and that i had to peddle to help them. When i boarded i paniked at the absence of footpedals and told a startled stewardess and a few passengers off for not helping the poor elephant. They also told me that the expression "paid peanuts" was what they gave the elephants in return for their services!

My grandpa had a plane when I was very young. I used to get so bored when we flew. Finally one day, when boredom was mounting, I asked my grandma why grandpa never stopped to let me out and play.

My heart broke when I found out that you couldn't walk on clouds.

I used to think that when you were ready to get on the plane, you would go outside and the plane would hover over the house and pick you up kinda like a taxi. The pilot would drop a big latter and you would climb on up :)

When i was younger i used to believe that when an airplane toilet flushed, it ejected the... waste... directly under the plane, hence the unbelieveable noise. Coming with this belief, i believed that if you sat on the toilet while you flushed, you could fall out through the toilet pipe. For these reasons, i always preferred to go to the toilet while we were flying over either the ocean or some unpopulated paddocks.

Only years later did i actually see sense that the airlines would not be allowed to do this. but that diddnt mean that i hated the noise any less.

When I was very young, I thought that every airplane I heard was directly above wherever I was and whoever was in the planes were going to drop bombs and kill everyone I knew.

When I was little, I thought that planes actually went all the way up into orbit. What's more, I actually maintained adamantly for years, despite my parent's denials, that I'd seen the earth out of a plane window about the size of a grapefruit.

I used to always want to go to the airport even if I wasn't going anywhere and every time I go I used to think I was getting closer to the counrty that person was going.

When I was little we went on a vacation to Florida to visit grandma over srping break. We stayed there for about ten days. I asked my mom why we had to stay their for so long. Mom told me that when you went to Florida you had to stay their for at least nine days. After that, I thought that their was a rule in Florida that you had to stay for at least nine days if you were vacationing there, otherwise they wouldn';t let you go and if you tried to get on a plane, back you couldn't. In the summer, when we went on a 45 day vacation to Europe, my mom tried to use the same trick on me to get me not to ask questions.

I used to believe when I was younger (10 or so) I thought that aeroplanes were flying cars. I believed this because they had their lights on (not just the flashy ones), and they looked like car head lights. I pointed it out to my dad one day and said, "look, a flying car". He explained that I was wrong and why. I was so embarrassed. Yet I think that it is funny to this day.

until we started to go to Spain on holiday i used to think that everyone went on holiday in a caravan like we did and that areoplanes were just too far away for me to be able to see this long line of caravans flying behind them with special wings attached.

when i was four my mom had a trip to london' england and she had to take a plane. i thought that the plane she was taking was going to park in our drive way and pick up my mom. the day of her trip i woke up at about 3 am hoping to get a glimpse of the plane. i was so dissipointed when i found out the plane was not coming to my house.

When I was younger, i think until i was 8 or so, I had watched "I Love Lucy" at my grandma's house. They were jumping out of a helicopter with parachutes, and I somehow believed that the only way to get off of a helicopter was to jump out!!! I later learned that helicopters had to land eventually!

From when I was 9 years old my parents would send me to my grandparents home each summer. When I flew on the airplanes, I used to believe that there were miniature cities near airports with exact replicas of everything – houses, cars, people, stoplights, churches. I used to love to look out the window when I flew on planes so I could see the miniature cities. When I didn’t see them, I was so disappointed and thought some airports didn’t have them for some reason. It took several years until I realized that what I was seeing was actually the difference of perspective when you were up in the air far from the ground.

Just before my friend's first journey on a plane, her brother told her that if she did a poo in the toilets, then the poo will go out of the plane and land on earth. He said to her that a few people got injured due to flying poo. She still believes in this even though she is 22!

I used to believe…

wehn me and my younger sister were about 5 and 6 (in the 80's) we lived near an airport, i used to tell her the planes were bombers from the war (second world war) and if they heard us moving about underneath them they would bomb us, my sister believed me and i had to come clean when i looked down on the botton bunk and saw my sister had turned blue from holding her breath.

I used to believe that if I was to fly from one state to another I was actually flying to another globe! When I got a little older and saw maps, I thought that if you were in the air you'd actually see the lines separating each state. Luckily I've grown up since then and gotten a wee bit smarter. :)