The summer of 2026 has been one of extraordinary fires. In Europe, they have burned hundreds of thousands of acres in France and Spain and destroyed homes across England; they killed 13 people in Spain last month, and an elderly couple in Greece this weekend. In Canada, fires have consumed an expanse of forestland larger than Belgium—which is also battling its biggest recorded wildfire. In the United States, about 7.2 million acres have burned, the largest year-to-date area in the past decade and nearly double what it was at this time last year, according to data from the National Interagency Coordination Center. Allison Rayburn, a program coordinator for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told me that in the eastern part of the state, “you can barely see the sun” through the smoke: “It’s just devastation, and miles and miles and miles of blackened landscapes.”

In Europe, many of the fires have threatened populated areas, but in the U.S., much of the area burning in the West has been rural. Near the Oregon town of Jordan Valley, the Big Grass Fire has been burning since July 23 and is among the largest fires in the state’s modern history; toward the end of last month, it hopped a canyon and crossed the border to Idaho, where the smoke from this and other fires made the air quality the worst in the country. The complex of fires in Spokane, Washington, flattened entire neighborhoods; three other wildfires 10 times its size are burning elsewhere in the state.

If 2025 was a year of urban fire that destroyed large swaths of Los Angeles, 2026 is a year of rural fire, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources’ research unit, told me. “This is an extraordinary fire season in the American West,” Swain said. “It just hasn’t been in California”—which usually accounts for much of the nation’s fire activity and its media attention.

Many of the biggest fires this year started because of back-to-back lightning strikes and have grown because of extreme heat, drought, and dry fuel left behind after an unusually warm winter. They’ve destroyed grazing land and crops, killed livestock, and incinerated fruit that was just shy of harvest. Many of the ranchers and government employees I spoke with compared 2026 to Oregon’s devastating fire season two years ago, when 1.9 million acres burned across the state; already this year, residents have lost hundreds of thousands more acres than that. When I spoke with Dave Upthegrove, Washington’s commissioner of public lands, he was driving from the fires in Spokane to one near Walla Walla that was threatening the town’s water supply; the week before, he’d visited the burn area of the 150,000-acre Sinlahekin Fire. Firefighters there had used a road as a fire line, he said, and on one side of it, all was flat and black. On the other side, crops were wilting from the fire’s heat.

Because so many of the fires this year are burning on rugged terrain without many roads, the elite firefighters who rappel from helicopters and hike through miles of forest to reach a fire line have been in high demand, Upthegrove said. But these hotshot crews cannot hit every fire, and in many cases, ranchers are the first to get there. Silas Skinner, a sixth-generation cattle rancher, told me that when the Big Grass Fire broke out, three government trucks were there; the rest were rigs from the Jordan Valley Rangeland Fire Protection Association. RFPAs—about 40 of which are spread across Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada—are independent, volunteer firefighting nonprofits composed of local ranchers and farmers who are trained by state and federal agencies to help fill the firefighting gap in rural areas. Their equipment comes largely from military surplus—literally, in some cases, bulldozers that didn’t get sent to Vietnam, “and some that did,” Rayburn, who is one of the RFPAs’ main contacts in the Oregon government, said. In the weeks since lightning struck and started the fire, Skinner and about 100 other volunteers have been using military trucks, outfitted with water tanks and sprayers, to help government agencies fight the Big Grass Fire. It is currently burning an expanse of sagebrush and juniper trees nearly the size of Luxembourg.

Federal agencies have also been sending in thousands of employees to fight the fires. But with so many fires burning simultaneously, government resources have been stretched thin and diverted to those in more populated places such as Spokane. The volunteer firefighters, then, have taken on more of a share of the work than they have in the past, they told me. (Both the Forest Service and Wildland Fire Service said that it’s standard for RFPAs to take on more work during a fire season this active.) When I spoke with Morgan Kromm, a rancher and the secretary of the RFPA in Crane, Oregon, and Tom Doman, the association’s chairman, they’d just come off a 10-day stretch of back-to-back firefighting. They told me they’d been working in 36-hour shifts, and when I asked where they’d catch naps during those stretches—in their trucks?—Doman clarified: “We were not sleeping.” The Crane RFPA has already handled 18 fires this year—normally the total they’d have seen by about October—and “we still have 90 more days of fire season,” Doman said.

Fire seasons vary by region, but in general, they have been getting longer and less predictable. Both RFPAs and state officials told me that this has made it difficult to get resources when and where they’re needed. Typically, Oregon enters into mutual-aid agreements with states in the Southwest and along the East Coast that have different fire seasons and can help one another out. But the whole country has been so dry that “they’re busy with their own fires,” Michael Curran, the chief of fire protection for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told me. RFPAs provide mutual aid to one another too, while members also try to manage their own ranches and farms alongside firefighting. “Yesterday, we were moving cows, and the fire was burning right above us,” Skinner said. “So everybody kind of had an eyeball on it.”

Some of his grazing land has already burned. Other ranchers have found that their cattle died in the fire. In Jordan Valley, community members have been donating hay to those whose land burned, so their cattle will have something to eat. Rayburn told me that since that terrible 2024 fire season, she has watched landowners “for two years rebuilding fences and reestablishing water holes and reestablishing their cattle herds.” Now the fires are burning those same places—land where families have lived for generations, and land upon which their livelihoods still depend.

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Until very recently, airplanes were one of the last places where you couldn’t count on having good Wi-Fi. Even the Amazon’s most remote villages have high-speed internet, but for years, the typical in-flight connectivity experience could have been best summed up by the aviation Reddit thread titled “WiFi horrible?”

Now major airlines have started rolling out Wi-Fi that is both free and usable. In June, United announced that by the end of this year, nearly 1,000 of its planes would be getting high-speed Wi-Fi via Starlink, the network of low-Earth-orbit satellites owned by SpaceX. Other major airlines, including Delta, JetBlue, and Alaska, are partnering with either Starlink or its closest competitor, Amazon Leo, to offer better Wi-Fi in the next year or two. This new technology provides almost the same internet experience you’d get on the ground, Seth Miller, an airline-industry analyst, told me. This is not Wi-Fi that’s “good for an airplane.” It’s just … good.

As technology conquers this final Wi-Fi frontier, air travel will never be the same. The fickleness that made in-flight Wi-Fi infuriating was also its own kind of luxury: Planes were a bastion of unreachability. And once that luxury is gone, we may miss it.

Delivering the internet to a metal tube traveling at 500 miles per hour, 30,000 feet above the Earth, is so difficult because the tube is both far from internet sources and constantly moving. In the early days of plane Wi-Fi, aircraft had what were essentially giant mobile hot spots attached to their bellies, which would connect to cell towers on the ground. (This was Gogo’s in-flight Wi-Fi which, let’s be honest, never really Gogo’d.) For the past decade or so, major airlines have connected instead to satellites about 22,000 miles above the Earth, which provided Wi-Fi good enough to send an email (sometimes) but too slow for Instagram. The satellites that Starlink and Amazon Leo use travel much closer to the Earth and the plane, so they’re about 10 times less laggy, Miller said. With these connections, people can use social media, play online poker, and—in theory—Zoom, though many airlines still forbid or discourage video calls.

This level of connectivity might sound like a win: Airplane travel is a cramped, chaotic experience; the least you might ask is for the ability to scroll through TikTok when the limited catalog of in-flight movies gets stale. The pitch, as Grant Milstead, the vice president of digital technology at United Airlines, told me, is that with faster, free Wi-Fi, the plane can become a “living room in the sky”—where, just like in a living room on the ground, people can have the TV on for entertainment, their laptop out for productivity, and their phones nearby for messages and social media. Some people are clearly embracing that reality: On a recent 10-hour flight, the guy next to me prepped a slide deck, listened to Spotify, and flirted over DM with someone I sincerely hoped was his girlfriend.

But this level of connectivity also means that, on a plane, you can no longer be blissfully unaware of what’s happening back on the ground. Before Starlink, someone on a business trip might still decide to expense suboptimal Wi-Fi to keep up the pretense of working. But for the rest of us, “Sorry, I was on a plane” was one of the last socially acceptable reasons a person could be unreachable while doing nothing except eating Biscoff cookies. A plane ride meant hours set aside to watch movies, read, or doodle, free of guilt and earthbound demands. Instead of responding to a message from your mother-in-law, you could look out the window and see rivers transformed into green ribbons. While my seatmate worked on his slide deck, all I did was watch Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick and slam Bloody Mary mix. It was glorious.

The level of disconnection on a plane might have once been an inconvenience, but now people pay good money for enforced breaks from their phone. Sixteen years ago, when Starbucks started offering free Wi-Fi, this magazine declared, “It’s about time!” These days, many cafés withhold Wi-Fi and ban laptops as a selling point. At least 10 million people use the Opal app, whose premium tier costs $100 annually, to lock themselves out of distracting apps, while others pay $59 for the Brick to do the same. Subpar airplane Wi-Fi included this kind of detox with the price of your ticket.

No one will argue that breathing stale air in a seat that offers 30 inches of leg room counts as a wellness retreat, and the research on how much dedicated tech detoxes actually improve well-being is mixed. Still, a disconnected plane ride “might create an opportunity to temporarily remove some of the demands that normally compete for our attention—email, work messages, social media, news, and notifications,” Lisa Walsh, a psychology professor who researches happiness at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, told me. Flying was a rare, bounded period of time untethered from the world below. Whether or not someone might benefit from that time depends on how they spend it, Kostadin Kushlev, a psychology professor at Georgetown who studies technology and well-being, told me. A nice use of a plane ride might include actually talking to the strangers next to you (an act tied to well-being, he said), letting your mind wander (also linked to well-being), or even just really focusing on Top Gun (research has yet to link Tom Cruise to well-being, but you never know). Kushlev told me about how, during grad school, he once set aside a flight to journal about what he wanted from his life and future. “It really kind of changed my trajectory,” he said. Now, with enough to keep him busy on the plane, he said, “I don’t bother.”

Of course, passengers don’t have to log into the Wi-Fi. But as fast connections become ubiquitous on planes, expectations may begin to shift. We already spend just about every moment of our life near our phones—at work, at the grocery store, at parties, at concerts, in bed, and, for the 75 percent of Americans who’ve copped to this, in the bathroom—where anyone can message us. Now people could easily expect a response while we’re hurtling through the lower stratosphere, too. (And if you don’t reply, people will know it’s because you wanted to eat Biscoff cookies and ignore them.) Connectivity also means the plane becomes just another place to be productive. Milstead, the United executive, told me that one of the company’s customers vibe-coded a website for his new business from the air. Meanwhile, people have already started complaining online about fellow passengers taking Zoom calls and Microsoft Teams meetings onboard. When your seatmate is leading a Q1 strategy session, staring out the window and daydreaming—one of the most distinct opportunities of flying—may seem like time wasted.

If 30,000 feet is yet another place where Zoom meetings are unavoidable, it’s hard not to see a future in which we are nostalgic for the recent past when the Wi-Fi was bad. The early aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh once wrote that flying is “a miracle that has nothing to do with any of its practical purposes—purposes of speed, accessibility, and convenience.” Instead, a plane ride was an opportunity to watch the familiar world grow strange. Most people who fly no longer treat the experience like a miracle, but now we barely need to notice we are up in the air. It’s just another place to check Instagram.