I admit part of that is a control issue, I find great comfort in knowing where I am and what's going on, but it's also a fascination with the world and the revelation that our planet is such a small place.
As the plane soars from horizon to horizon, leaving a white line across the sky like the ones I watch enviously when I'm on the ground, I see the names of places I know from the history books and travel pages.
Today, on my six-hour hop from London's Heathrow to the long strip of concrete in the middle of the sand that marks Abu Dhabi's desert airport, we flew a big arc from England to the UAE which took us over some notable locations.
We took off into the north an did a big right turn and then flew over the English Channel going feet dry -- that's US Navy talk for the moment one flies over the coast to be above land rather than water -- at a little place called The Hague.
As we flew over this Dutch address I thought about all the nasty pasties who have sat in the dock of the world's war crimes tribunal and wondered if there would ever be a day when there would no longer be a need for that particular institution.
We flew over Hannover in Germany and Krakow in Poland -- another spot that saw its share of war criminals -- before crossing the Black Sea coast south west of Odessa.
As the map cycled through, zooming in to give a more detailed picture of our location, I noticed other intriguing locations.
Warsaw and Moscow were off our left wing, Bucharest and Sofia were out to the right, and features with names like Porcupine Bank, Gloria Ridge, Josephine Seamount, Great Meteor Tableland were way behind us in the expanse of blue that marked the Atlantic Ocean.
Cities that once sat behind the iron curtain, places I only heard about when I was watching the Olympics and some good Soviet citizen won a gold medal, were out there to the north and east.
Kursk, Kiev, Minsk, Novgorod, Tula, Gdansk, cities I can only imagine by borrowing pictures from old editions of National Geographic which fill my head with images of soldiers turkey stepping through vast concrete parade grounds, bleak apartment buildings and centralized sports academies.
As we flew across the Black Sea Yalta was off to our left -- a settlement thathosted a significant meeting back during WW2 -- and places like Varna, Constanta, Samsun, Sochi, Batumi and Trabzon were dots on the shore.
For a while after we left the Black Sea the clouds cleared far below and, instead of looking at a layer of cotton wool, I could see the snow-covered landscape of northern Turkey (right).White covered everything, except the roads which looked like black ribbons laid on a piece of fabric, and I could see towns and villages because the asphalt grids stood out even from 10 kilometres up.
The creeks and rivers that started high in the mountains, and emptied into the lakes that filled the valleys, were the most intriguing feature and it looked like the same artist had poured a tub of ink over dense paper with the black liquid bleeding into the fibre.
The second leg of my long journey home, the 14-hour hop from Abu Dhabi to Tullamarine Airport on the outskirts of Melbourne, covered a lot of blue with the Airbus I was travelling in crossing the coast about an hour into the flight somewhere above Oman.
We flew parallel to the west coast of India -- Mumbai and Goa were cities that sat out to the east -- and we flew 700km from the Sri Lankan city of Colombo before crossing the Equator and aiming for Perth.
The names of more underwater features filled the flight-tracker map as we flew over the Indian Ocean -- the Carlsburg Ridge, Somali Basin, Chagos Trench, Nikitin Seamount, Ninetyeast Ridge, Chagos-Latccadive Plateau and Amirante Trench.
When it was about 11pm in London and 10am in Melbourne I looked out the window and could see a cluster of island far below, possibly a Maldivian atoll, with lights marking the outline of each piece of land.
I was thinking about sleeping, so had my eyes shut listening to my iPod, but when I opened my eyes the Southern Cross was framed by the window with that bottom star pointing at my house in Sunbury.
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