High Life : A WEEKLY FORUM FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS : A First-Class Hassle in Coach : Travel: Getting there is half the battle for a passenger on a long-distance flight.

There’s an old maxim about travel--”Getting there is half the fun.” I used to think this was true, especially about air travel. This past summer, however, I learned otherwise.

I spent more than 30 hours in airplanes and hated all but a few minutes of it.

It was my first long-distance flight that gave me my newfound loathing for air travel.

The flight was a nonstop, overnight “hop” from Los Angeles to Frankfurt, Germany. Amazingly, I’d looked forward to the extended flight.

But 10 hours of sitting in a seat that reclined all of six inches shattered my excitement.

To add to my “enjoyment of the flight,” I received “complimentary” headphones, which the stewardesses took back at flight’s end.

My pleasure of listening to the featured multichannel Muzak-in-the-sky was dimmed by the fact that, unless I exerted constant pressure on the headphone jack, I heard music only in my left ear.

The in-flight movies were also a letdown. Both were strange films that I’d never heard of, nor cared to (“The Footman,” a French movie about an Italian that was dubbed into English and German and had something to do with politics and cracking roof plaster, and the “African Dream,” parts of which I watched sans headphones to make it more interesting).

Both 10-inch TVs were partially obscured by the curtain rods that screened us from the business class, just to make us wish we’d paid the extra $300 to get decent food, a little more room and, perhaps, even some sleep.

Unable to stand the films any longer, I donned a sleeping mask (which had been smuggled in from another airline by the kind grandmother who sat next to me), tuned into the big-band-hits-of-the-’40s channel and tried to doze.

But the odds of sleep were against me at 35,000 feet and 350 m.p.h. in a pressurized metal cylinder held aloft by physics principles, somewhere over a large, cold expanse of water, sitting in a hard, foam-rubber chair at a near-upright position, a blindfold on and Glenn Miller being piped into one ear.

I broke the monotony of the journey by frequently peeking out the window to see if there might, perchance, be land under us. There wasn’t.

Once I was astonished to see little icebergs (actually, they must have been pretty big). I said to a fellow passenger, “Hey, look! Icebergs!”

Although she looked, it was clear she didn’t find them nearly as interesting as I did. So I decided not to tell anyone when I thought I saw Greenland.

Throughout the night, the drink-carting stewardesses paced the aisles, evidently trying to deplete the plane’s supply of carbonated water, soda and juice.

At some obscure point, the plane’s staff decided it was, in fact, morning and commenced with passing out hot, wet, burrito-shaped washcloths.

We ate breakfast, waited a while longer, flew over England and Scotland, the North Sea, the Netherlands, and finally over Germany, which looked the same as England, Scotland and the Netherlands, although it was a bit greener than the North Sea.

We landed in Frankfurt, the only city in Europe whose name is often misspelled as a city in Kentucky.

Perhaps the worst part of flying is that you begin and end each trip in an airport.

The section of the Frankfurt airport we visited that day was apparently built under the premise that, if the concourse looks too nice, the pilots won’t want to leave and flights will be delayed.

The interior was repressively green and dirty beige, and the ceiling was merely a black grids that exhibited the fine air ducts and high-voltage wiring that would normally be concealed by more solid roofing systems.

As I sat on the chocolate-brown carpet of the gate area, waiting to get on another plane, eat another airline meal and spend another hour trying to sleep, I decided that whoever wrote the maxim about getting there being half the fun obviously never flew coach.