Miles better

At Glasgow, the businessmen and women sit as if waiting for a bus; which is precisely what it was to most of them: the 6.15 to London, arriving some 50 minutes and 400 miles later.

But this is sad.  Aeroplane rides remain as one of the twentieth century's quintessential acts: it is one of the few things which most people can do now which could not have been generally possible a hundred years ago.  True, greater changes have taken place, most notably as a result of electricity and, more recently, computers.  But for pure personal experience, there is little to match it.

Which is why, when I travel by plane, I always strive to savour the sheer mind-boggling unnaturalness of the whole process.  For a start, there are the airports.  These huge bustling convergences of people, some resident, dedicated to guiding in and out these improbable tubes of metal, others transient, flowing to and fro in sudden concentrations and dilations.  The buildings are great sprawling structures which mirror the organisational set-up which determines them and validates them.  Their halls sprout long tentacles which reach out and embrace the waiting planes.

Ritual is everywhere.  First you queue to check-in; then you queue to pass through security, itself a kind of hieratic purging of impure elements before you are worthy to approach the godhead. You pass to the inner sanctum of departure lounge before finally moving on to a further queuing and checking, another wait, and then a repeat of the process before embarkation.  All of this wreathed in the growing fumes of airports' own special incense: air kerosene.

Nor has the process ended once you have boarded the plane.  The great shining beast moves slowly and awkwardly over the ground, almost a parody of the grace it will soon exhibit; it is like some gawky bird whose huge and spectacular plumage is a burden on earth but its glory in the air.  And like the first few beats of those great pinions, so the first lunging acceleration as the plane springs down the runway at take off makes the heart leap with it.

You are pressed back into you seat, waiting for that moment of benediction, that miracle when hundreds of tons of metal slowly but effortlessly lift off the ground where they so plainly ought to belong, and soar off into the blue above.  It is this transcendent moment which should shock travellers every time they fly, just as the fact of hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour in a large metal tube should be a matter of constant wonder to them.

That it is not to most of the travellers on the 6.15 to London is a tragedy.  They have lost a real sense of what this century has achieved, and what mankind has achieved.  They have lost too that wonderful and humbling insight air travel offers us: the sight of our tiny world below.  Seen from this new and in some ways truer perspective, we can gain important knowledge about ourselves and our inherent and abiding vulnerability - for all our spectacular and wonderful technology. 

(7.3.88)

See also Moody Sonnets - Clapham Uncommon

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