My Imaginary Airline Has a Better Safety Record Than My Actual Life Choices

Let me paint you a picture. It's 2 a.m. on a Tuesday. A reasonable person is asleep. I am not a reasonable person. I am deep in a Google Doc — 34 pages and climbing — detailing the fleet retirement schedule for Caldwell Air, a regional carrier that exists exclusively inside my skull and, apparently, a growing portion of my Google Drive storage.

Caldwell Air was founded in 1987 (in my head). It operates out of a fictional hub in a made-up city called Portmore, somewhere between Columbus and Cincinnati in the vague geography of my imagination. It has a frequent flyer program. It had a labor dispute in 2003. One of its Bombardier CRJ-200s was involved in a minor incident near a fictional regional airport in 2009 — nobody was hurt, the investigation concluded pilot fatigue, and new rest protocols were implemented. I wrote the NTSB summary myself. It is six paragraphs long.

I have never worked in aviation. I have no plans to work in aviation. Caldwell Air will never, ever be real.

And yet.

You Are Not Alone in This Particular Spiral

Here's the thing I discovered when I finally, nervously, admitted this to the internet: I am not the only one. Not even close.

A Reddit thread I stumbled into at some point — the kind you find when you type something into a search bar at an hour when your judgment is compromised — was full of people describing eerily similar situations. There was a woman in Portland who had been quietly developing a fictional university system for eleven years. Full accreditation history. A rivalry with a neighboring fictional school that dated back to a disputed 1962 football game. She'd written the Wikipedia article for it. She showed me the citations. They were formatted correctly.

There was a guy in Atlanta who built an imaginary municipal transit authority for a city he calls New Dellmore. He has the bus routes. He has the fare structure. He has the controversial 2018 budget cuts that led to reduced service on the outer lines and a very heated fictional city council meeting that he described with the exhausted energy of someone who had genuinely been there.

"I think about the commuters," he told me, completely seriously. "The people who relied on those outer routes. It wasn't fair to them."

He was upset. About a bus service. In a city that does not exist. And honestly? I understood completely.

Why Does Our Brain Do This, Though

I asked a friend who has a psychology degree and the patience to humor me about this stuff. She didn't diagnose me with anything, which I appreciated, but she did use the phrase "narrative scaffolding" approximately four times, so I felt like I got my money's worth.

The short version: humans are meaning-making machines. We are, at our core, story engines with anxiety disorders and opinions about font choices. When the real world feels chaotic, unpredictable, or just relentlessly exhausting, some brains respond by constructing environments where all the variables are known. Where you wrote the rules. Where the 2003 labor dispute was resolved through good-faith negotiation and a modest wage increase because YOU decided that's how it went.

Control is the keyword here. Not in a sinister way. In a "the world is a lot and sometimes I need a place where I am personally in charge of the regulatory framework" kind of way.

There's also something to be said for the specificity. Vague daydreaming — imagining yourself rich, or famous, or inexplicably great at tennis — is one thing. But the people building fictional institutions aren't fantasizing about glory. They're fantasizing about systems. About the unglamorous, load-bearing infrastructure of a thing. The procurement process for Caldwell Air's new seat covers. The budget line for de-icing fluid. The middle manager in operations who is quietly excellent at his job and has been with the company since 1994.

That's not escapism in the traditional sense. That's something weirder and, I'd argue, more interesting.

The Lore Goes Deep (It Always Goes Deep)

What strikes me most, talking to fellow fictional institution architects, is how quickly the lore develops internal logic and then starts pushing back.

The Portland university woman told me she once tried to retroactively change the outcome of the 1962 football game and found she couldn't. "It would break too much downstream," she said. "The rivalry shapes the culture of both schools. If Harwick didn't win that game, the whole character of the athletic department changes. I'd have to rewrite decades of institutional memory."

She was not joking. She had mapped the downstream consequences. The fictional game result was load-bearing.

I have experienced this myself. I once considered giving Caldwell Air a brief codeshare agreement with a major carrier in the mid-2000s, which would have been a significant revenue boost during a difficult period for regional aviation. But it would have changed the airline's identity too much. Caldwell Air is scrappy. It's regional. It's the kind of carrier where the gate agents know your name and the CEO still occasionally walks the terminal. A major codeshare would have compromised that. I didn't do it.

I made a strategic business decision for a fake airline to protect its fictional corporate culture.

I'm fine.

Is This Productive? Let's Pretend to Debate It

The obvious question — the one your more practical friends will ask if you ever admit to this — is whether any of this counts as real creativity. Whether it's actually doing anything.

Here's my answer, which I've had time to develop because I've been thinking about it while updating Caldwell Air's maintenance logs: it depends entirely on what you think creativity is for.

If creativity is only valid when it produces a sellable artifact — a novel, a screenplay, a pitch deck for an actual airline — then sure, this is all very elaborate procrastination. But if creativity is also about the act of making, about the cognitive pleasure of building something coherent and detailed and yours, then this absolutely counts. The Portland woman isn't writing a novel about her fictional university. She's not trying to. The university is the point. The making is the point.

Also, and I say this with full sincerity: the people I spoke to were uniformly thoughtful, funny, and capable of talking about systems and logistics and institutional culture with a depth that would make most actual middle managers weep with envy. Whether this is a cause of their fictional institution-building or an effect of it, I genuinely cannot tell you.

Caldwell Air's Current Status

For those wondering: Caldwell Air is doing okay. The fleet modernization project is ongoing. There was some turbulence — metaphorical, mostly — during the post-pandemic recovery period, but passenger numbers are back up and the new loyalty program restructuring has been well-received by frequent flyers.

The middle manager in operations just got a small raise. He deserved it. He's been there since 1994.

I'm very proud of him.

I'm going to go to bed now.