Flying is an analogy for all things unintuitive in physics.
Last week I finally moved from Arizona to Hawaii. In the past couple of years I developed a bit of a fear of flying. I think the new security regulations fed into that - it all seems a bit 1984. I hadn't flown since 2001, after a very rocky (but thankfully brief) flight from Phoenix to Las Vegas. There was no remedy for it; if I wanted to get to Hawaii, I needed to take to the air.
Flying as a passenger in an airplane isn't something you should think about too deeply. It still seems nonsensical that a large metal object can travel at high speed through the air. But it doesn't violate the laws of physics. In a sense, flight is representative of a lot of modern physics - there are so many strange things that have been uncovered by physics, so many things that are completely unintuitive, like electromagnetism, or subatomic particles, or the accelerating expansion of the universe. It doesn't seem like that's how the world should function, but it does. And it's wonderful.
