The Clapping

Recently, I traveled from Canada to a Caribbean destination. The flight there has mostly dissolved into the pleasant fog of pre-vacation optimism. You know the feeling: cramped seats that appear to have been designed by someone who hates knees and humans 6' or taller, a snack that may once have been food-adjacent, and a general sense that physics has been temporarily repurposed to move you somewhere warm.

None of it really registered because I was too busy imagining beaches and pretending the armrest dispute with my neighbor was beneath me.

The return flight, however, had the advantage of clarity—specifically the clarity that comes from irritation.

Our flight was scheduled to leave at 21:30 for a modest 3.5-hour hop back to Canada. Instead, we waited. And waited. Four hours, to be precise. Four hours in an airport that seemed committed to the bold design philosophy of having absolutely nothing in it. No restaurants, no real seating strategy beyond “stand somewhere and reflect on your choices,” nothing but the slow existential dread that comes from watching the departure board refuse to change. My frustration was only increased by the fact that the only flights not leaving the airport were our carrier: WestJet. Everyone else was leaving the airport as scheduled. This, was all to do with a server failure at the Calgary Headquarters of WestJet. Now, pardon me, I have been in my life an IT director, administrator, technical support and also a software engineer. I know, systems, can be designed with fail-safes. This particular system, I am sure should be designed with more redundancies than telling customers on an entire continent “Our server failed”. I know this to be possible. But WestJet being cheap bastards isn’t what I want to talk about.

Eventually, we boarded. Spirits were low, patience was thin, and the collective mood of the aircraft was bleak at best.

And then we landed.

The wheels touched the runway, the engines reversed, and the aircraft slowed to a completely routine stop. At that exact moment, something extraordinary happened.

The cabin erupted into applause.

Not polite clapping, mind you. Not a modest smattering of relieved appreciation. Full applause. Enthusiastic, unified, sincere applause—like the pilot had just completed a triple backflip in a Boeing 737 while simultaneously solving world hunger.

And this is where I became fascinated.

Because, technically speaking, landing the plane is… the job. In fact, it’s arguably the central feature of the job. One could even say it’s the minimum expectation. Airlines rarely advertise flights with the slogan: “We’ll try our best to land.”

Which raises a broader question about our standards for applause.

We don’t clap when a server brings our food, despite the fact that the server navigated a crowded restaurant carrying multiple plates without spilling soup on any toddler. That’s impressive. No applause.

We don’t clap when a plumber fixes a catastrophic pipe situation that had been threatening to turn our basement into a municipal swimming pool. Silence.

Doctors prescribe antibiotics that eliminate an infection. Engineers design bridges that do not collapse. Electricians prevent our homes from becoming experimental fireworks displays.

Programmers quietly deploy code that prevents half the internet from collapsing on a Tuesday morning.

And then there’s the IT help desk.

The IT help desk tech is perhaps the most tragically under-applauded professional of them all. This is a person who spends their entire day solving problems they did not create, in systems they did not design, for people who are already annoyed before the conversation even begins.

They pick up the phone only to be greeted with a sentence that usually begins with, “Your system is broken.”

Not a system. Not the system. Your system.

As if the help desk tech personally installed the bug sometime around lunch just to make your day more interesting.

And yet, despite the odds, despite the frustration, despite the occasional verbal abuse coming from someone whose printer has decided to pursue a different career path, the IT help desk worker perseveres. And the angry client doesn't even know what a NullPointerException bloody means.

But the tech punches a few keys and suddenly the problem is gone. No applause.

Yet a pilot performs the maneuver that the aircraft, the training, the autopilot, the instruments, and the entire field of aviation engineering were designed to accomplish, and the cabin transforms into a mid-air appreciation ceremony.

It’s a curious ritual.

Perhaps the applause isn’t really about the pilot. Perhaps it’s about us. Maybe it’s a collective celebration of surviving several hours in a pressurized aluminum tube with strangers, recycled air, and a man next to us who believes the armrest is a constitutional right.

The moment stuck with me.

I remain slightly puzzled by the airborne standing ovation for a successful landing—especially after a four-hour delay.