Getting the flavor of...

Seeing Alaska by bush plane

“Flying on a bush mail plane in central Alaska feels like an experience out of another era,” said Kari Bodnarchuk in The Boston Globe. Warbelow’s Air Ventures, a small company in Fairbanks, Ala., delivers mail, food, and other essentials to seven towns within a 110-mile radius, and I recently was among four tourists welcomed to pay for the right to ride along. The 2½-hour journey, at $199 a seat, is “a fun and inexpensive way to get a bird’s-eye view of interior Alaska,” and you’re likely to ride with local legend Matt Anderson, who’s been a pilot for 40-plus years. The drone of the plane’s twin engines “made talking a struggle,” so we “mostly kept noses pressed to the windows” as we cruised over snowy mountaintops, frozen rivers, and forests of spruce and aspen. We met a few locals along the way, chatting briefly with whoever met the plane on the airstrip. At one point, we flew over snow-covered mountains where dozens of caribou “dotted the landscape like sprinkles on ice cream.”

“You don’t need a mask mandate to wear a mask,” said Rachel Wilkerson Miller in Vox. Despite a Florida judge’s recent ruling that struck down a federal mandate, the CDC still recommends masks for passengers on planes and other shared transport modes. Covid infection rates are climbing again, and the science hasn’t changed: “Masks work”—protecting both yourself and others. Even when people near you are unmasked, a tight-fitting N95 or KN95 definitely reduces the chances of contracting the virus. It’s true that the ventilation systems on planes are effective filters, but they often don’t run when the plane is sitting at the gate, and trains and buses have “terrible” ventilation. “At minimum, you should wear a mask when you’re taking transit to the airport, in the airport, boarding the plane, taxiing on the runway, and disembarking the plane.”