Ad Watch: why we take off and don't flap

Let's enjoy another Delta Airlines ad narrated by Donald Sutherland.

This one's called "Take Off: Why We Go," and I think they're trolling us now. 

In case you don't want to waste thirty seconds of your time watching an ad on purpose, here's what we got: on top of blurry footage of bands and blotches of color rushing by, Donald Sutherland steadfastly refuses to flap. It's almost heroic.

What’s happening here is not normal; it’s extraordinary.
Two hundred and nineTy-one people, three hundred and fifTy tons,
one hundred and eighTy-six miles per hour. 

(Blah blah blah. A bunch of heavy breathing about pioneers and covered wagons and the wonderfulness of people who sit on planes.) 

EighTy thousand people now, on the ground, in the air, engines on.
Because there is no stop in us, or you. Only go.

In case you're new here, those capital Ts are my way of representing what we (yes, all of us) call aspirated Ts. This is the sound you hear at the beginning of a word like Tuesday. It's very different from the sound we spell with a t, but which we (well, we Americans) pronounce in a word like water. That sound—the one in water—is a flap, and it's what we would expect to hear in the word eighty. But not in a Delta ad. No, sir and/or madam.

Because that would fail to... It would fail to, well... I don't know why they can't do that, but they can't. Like many others, they seem to believe that flapping sends the Wrong Signal. It indicates a lack of precision and maybe even a lack of being able to fly airplanes. It's all very strange.  

Addendum (9/28/15): I didn't include this in the partial transcript of the ad above, but there's another peculiar thing in here, beyond Donald Sutherland's infuriating refusal to flap. At the 0:20 mark:

You're not sure what's on the other side to that time after you land...

If you're anything like me, you're thinking, "Wha?!" On the other side... to something? Did the completely standard English phrase "the other side of something" change when we weren't looking? (But we're always looking!) I simply don't believe that anyone else anywhere has ever said something like, "The remote? Oh, it's on the other side to the couch." Why are advertisements so weird?