It is not only that there are dear overseas people and dear overseas places one pines for, but also that one is sorely missing the magic of the experience of being soaringly taken to them by astonishing aircraft.

For Canberrans the piquancy of our flightlessness has increased in recent days by Singapore Airlines' suspension of flights to and from Canberra. Those flights had somehow (symbolically and in real ways) connected Canberra to the rest of the world.

I might have kept this small, bourgeois hankering to myself if, in recent days, I hadn't read two fine new pieces about the beauty, wonder, splendour and rapture of flying. The two writers, Vanessa R. Schwartz in the online Aeon and Nina MacLaughlin in the online Paris Review show me that after all I am not alone (that there are at least three of us) in thinking flying magical.

Here (with parental guidance required for this column's readers not yet 15) is Nina McLaughlin, taxiing towards us in her piece What Does The Sky Feel Like?

"The last time I was on an airplane ... as the plane picked up speed along the runway, we were pressed against the seats in a sensation I always associate with sex. I inhaled and held my good-luck rock.

"The moment when the whole heft of the airplane leaves the surface of the earth is a moment of enormous erotic charge. The rise and press and all-at-once feeling of elsewhere, a temporary reprieve from the regular pull. In liftoff, in the erotic moment, we are freed of something.

"What are we freed of? Gravity's tug, time's nonstop forward surge. Time surrounds us, spreading forever in all directions. And gravity still applies, but we are entered into a changed awareness of weight. There is more and less of it at once. We are both relieved of it (I'm flying! I'm dissolving!) and under a stronger spell of its power (shoulders pressed against a cushioned place; gut in hips)."

Yes, with taking off in a jet aeroplane being "a moment of enormous erotic charge" no wonder some of us are missing it so much. Moments of enormous erotic charge are scarce.

Vanessa R. Schwartz's essay Fly With Me is a long-read nugget from her brand new book Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Motion in Motion.

The professor is interested in how people and society have been indelibly changed by the Jet Age. For her that age began in 1958 when Boeing's newfangled 707s began to whisk us across incredible distances at incredible heights and speeds (more than 500 miles per hour and 30,000 feet respectively). The 707's passengers experienced this in circumstances profound and strange. Passengers were hurtling, really, but had no sense at all of moving. The novel experience played with and boggled the mind.

"The industrial designer George Nelson in 1967," Schwartz tell us, "described passenger encapsulation - 'The prime characteristic of modern travel is that it tends to isolate one from experience'. The faster the vehicle went, the less the passenger experienced any sense of motion at all.

"A passenger, interviewed about flying in a jet in 1966, said: "The plane is really yourself, it is you, with wings."

Schwartz rhapsodises: "What could be a better definition of the experience of fluid motion?"

"Human and machine had seemingly become one. This was a new kind of experience: going far, fast, while seeming to go nowhere at all."

No wonder then, since a jet aeroplane is us, but now with wings, we are moping about having to be so earthbound, wondering if we will ever fly again, green with envy of the eagles.

This columnist had never been in an aeroplane of any kind before, in 1965, the Menzies' government, luring this English teenager into the folly-adventure of migration, ensconced me aboard a Boeing 707 in London and flew me to Sydney.

My first ever liftoff, from London's Heathrow, was an enormous erotic charge. One knew one was being freed of something but couldn't put what it was into words. But now one sees, thanks to Nina McLaughlin, that one was being freed of the tyranny of gravity's tug.

In those ye olde days the flying migrant's pilgrimage from London to Sydney involved many stops for refuelling and leg stretching. From memory (and my memory is not what it was and as well I may be romanticising things) we went from London to Sydney via Rome, Beirut, Karachi, Timbuktu, Atlantis, Brigadoon, Camelot, Eldorado, Samarkand, Brigadoon, Robotropolis, Frostbite Falls, New Delhi, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, Popocatepetl, Megatokyo, Rangoon, Hong Kong and Darwin.

Vanessa Schwartz gives the jet age credit for some important changes to our lives and thoughts.

"The greatest legacy is that the jet-age aesthetic transformed subjective experience itself, ushering in a culture that would soon conceive of the 'networked society' because human subjects could visualise being connected without being physically present.

"Jet-age people learned to close the distances between physical space and time, and to toggle between the material and immaterial worlds ... The internet and its underlying infrastructure offer the most remarkable media form of sensationless, fluid motion.

"It exemplifies the impact of the jet age, and allows us to make sense of our experiences when 'surfing' the internet - when we actually go nowhere at all."