Somebody asked me last month why I drove to Phoenix instead of flying. Six hours behind the wheel versus a seventy-five minute flight. They asked it the way you'd ask a man why he'd chosen to swim across a river with a bridge right there.
Here's my answer. I left my house at 6am. I stopped when I wanted to. I listened to an entire album — the whole thing, in order, the way it was built — and I pulled into Phoenix at noon having spoken to exactly zero strangers and taken off exactly zero shoes.
Now do the flight. Leave for LAX at 6am to be safe, because LAX is not a place you gamble with. Park in a structure that costs more per day than the hotel. Stand in a line to be told your bag is a quarter inch too tall. Stand in another line to be scanned. Sit at a gate for forty minutes. Board in the fourth group. Sit on the tarmac. Fly seventy-five minutes with a stranger's elbow in my ribs. Deplane. Wait for a bag. Wait for a rental car shuttle that circles the airport like it's looking for its keys.
Five and a half hours, minimum, and I hated every one of them. Versus six hours where I was in charge the entire time.
The Time Argument Is a Lie.
People compare flight time to drive time. That's not the comparison. Nobody has ever flown for seventy-five minutes. You fly for five hours and spend seventy-five minutes of it in the air.
Under a thousand miles, the math almost never favors the plane once you count the airport tax — the drive to it, the two-hour buffer, the security theater, the bag carousel, the ground transportation on the other end. Phoenix, Vegas, San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento. All of it is a car trip pretending to be a flight.
And the drive time is honest. Six hours is six hours. It doesn't become nine because a plane in Denver has a mechanical issue and a chain reaction ate your afternoon. Driving has one failure mode — traffic — and I live in Los Angeles, so I've already made peace with traffic the way people in Florida make peace with hurricanes.
Nobody has ever flown for seventy-five minutes. You fly for five hours and spend seventy-five minutes of it in the air.
It's Not the Flying. It's the Powerlessness.
I'm not afraid of planes. Physics is fine. Pilots are excellent. Statistically I should be far more nervous on the 10 freeway than at 36,000 feet, and I know it.
What I can't stand is that from the second I walk into a terminal until the second I get my bag back, I have no agency whatsoever. I stand where I'm told. I take off what I'm told. I wait when I'm told and I don't get told why. If it goes wrong, there's nothing I can do except join a line of four hundred equally powerless people to speak to one gate agent who is having a worse day than all of us combined.
I run companies. My entire professional existence is built on being able to do something about a problem at 2am. Air travel is the one system I regularly enter where my competence, my money, and my willingness to work are all completely irrelevant. That's not inconvenience. That's an insult with a boarding group attached.
In a car, if something goes wrong, I'm the guy who fixes it. Wrong route — take another. Tired — pull over. Hungry — there's a place off the exit with a hand-painted sign, and those are always either terrible or the best meal of the trip. Either way it's a story. Nothing that has ever happened to me in a Southwest boarding line has been a story.
The Drive Is the Point.
Here's what I actually don't say out loud very often: the drive is my favorite part.
The 395 north out of LA, once you clear the top of the basin and the desert opens up and the Sierra just stands there on your left doing its thing — that's one of the great roads in America and it's in my backyard. The 5 at 5am when the valley is still dark and the trucks are the only other things awake. The long empty stretch to Vegas where the radio quits on you and you find out what you actually want to listen to.
You do not get one single moment of that from seat 22B. You get a tray table and a bag of pretzels and a screen telling you how much longer you have to endure.
I do some of my best thinking in a car. Not deliberate thinking — the other kind. The kind where a problem you've been chewing on for three weeks quietly solves itself somewhere around Barstow because your hands are busy and nobody can call you. I've restructured a business plan on the 15. I've talked myself out of two bad hires between Bakersfield and Sacramento. That's not wasted time. That's the most productive unbothered stretch I get all month.
Miles. That's roughly my threshold. Under it, I drive and don't think twice. Over it, fine — I'll fly. Grudgingly.
Yes, I Still Fly.
I'm not a lunatic. I'm not driving to New York to save myself the indignity of a security line. Cross-country, I fly. Overseas, obviously I fly. There's a threshold and I respect it.
But I've noticed something about the people who default to flying for everything: most of them have never actually run the numbers. They just assume the plane is faster because the plane goes faster. Speed of the vehicle isn't speed of the trip. That's a telecom guy talking — I spend my professional life explaining to people that the fastest link in the chain doesn't matter if the handoffs are garbage. Airports are the handoffs. Airports are where the trip goes to die.
The fastest link in the chain doesn't matter if the handoffs are garbage. Airports are the handoffs.
Give Me the Keys.
So yeah — call me when you land. I left three hours after you and I'll probably beat you to dinner, and I'll get there having heard four albums, eaten something questionable in Baker, and figured out a thing I'd been stuck on since June.
You'll get there having been processed.
I'll take the nine hours. Every time.