This weekend the Times travel section wrote about frequent flier security programs, including TSA PreCheck—or, as the government likes to call it, TSA Pre✓™. Mostly it was just speculation from the writer: "I’m anticipating an expedited stroll through a special security checkpoint." Oh honey! Well, let me tell you about that expedited stroll, as a bona fide government-approved flying person who has now strolled security more expeditiously than can be believed.

This is one of my weird hobbyhorses, so, sorry, but! Everyone I know is terrified by turbulence, so today's PSA is: "About 60 people, two-thirds of them flight attendants, are injured by turbulence annually in the United States." That's also usually because they just weren't wearing seatbelts. THE MORE YOU KNOW.

Dear brown friends,

So by now you know: if you make noises, move about the plane, feel ill, talk to people in a non-English language, gesture, wear a backpack, or, now, spend your time on the plane "passing notes and writing in a notebook," you will not arrive at your destination, as the allegedly brown passengers on this week's Delta flight from D.C. to Oregon found out.

Please make a note of these forbidden behaviors. It might be best if you just drug yourself into oblivion while flying? But don't get too drugged: if you slur your words or "act strangely," you will also find [...]

The skies over Europe have reopened after days and days of being blocked by ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano, with 80% of scheduled flights expected to take off today and all of them supposedly going airborne tomorrow! But given that there are some 95,000 cancellations that need to have their passengers rerouted, we can probably expect to hear complaining about The Deal With Airports for another couple of days, at the very least.

People who hate flying all pretty much hate the usual things. They hate: turbulence, confinement, heights, strange sensations of velocity or tilt, being out of control, and, of course, other people. And there's lots of these phobic people! It's the most popular of all of our modern phobias. The other day, someone asked: what are the most important things to do in life before I have a baby next year? And I was like: fly on airplanes all the time, because flying phobias often have their onset when people have babies. (That's because that's when straight people finally realize their mortality. Silly straight people.)

There are plenty of programs [...]

Dave Bry explains one more reason not to have children: childbirth is the number one indicator of an adult onset of fear of flying.