How confirmed airliner geeks express their terminal love of travel in a world of "destinations," but no borders.

Sept. 24, 2004 | "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."

-- Robert Louis Stevenson

Picking up from last week, we can add Turkey, Peru, Kyrgyzstan and Japan to Ask the Pilot's rapidly widening empire.

I reckon my overseas readership is a testament to one of two things: either the trans-border appeal of Salon.com's general content (in other words, Salon as the world's voyeur-portal for America's embarrassing political woes), or, perhaps more boringly, the internationalist appeal of civil aviation.

All airliner nuts, by rule and by nature, are internationalists. Check the postings some time on Airliners.net, with their little U.N.-style designators. That's the way life unfolds when, like I was, you're a seventh grader mesmerized by the routes and fleets of the world's airlines. Your infatuation carries you, almost literally, up and out of your country and into a huge, unaligned realm of "destinations." To the air-flight aficionado, Earth is a borderless place of stopovers and hubs, demarcated not by the fences of state and politics, but by the networks of the airlines.

Continued here (free trial subscription)