Print article Airline schedules are nothing if not aspirational. It’s sort of like a letter to Santa Claus from the air carrier: “Dear Santa, We want to fly here, here and here. Please make the virus go away so our customers will want to travel again.” Back in pre-internet times, airlines used to publish their schedules in little booklets. I had a stack of them on the nightstand. I would go to sleep dreaming about my next nonstop flight to San Francisco or Honolulu. This year has been a lesson about how fast schedules can change. Starting last March, all of the best nonstop flights from Anchorage began disappearing. Anchorage-Atlanta: gone. Anchorage-Newark: gone.