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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Before a holiday on which more people fly than any other, the pilot remembers why he loves commercial airlines and solicits readers for Thanskgiving aviation memories.
Nov 26, 2003 | Even before I'd completed last Friday's column -- part mini temper tantrum, part somber exposé -- I knew what was coming: If the business of flying planes is truly the all-or-nothing crapshoot I've detailed, why would anybody go through the trouble of joining such a lousy profession?
That's not a question submitted by readers, but one I was asking myself. By Friday afternoon, however, my mailbox was getting its share of likewise sentiment. "How could you stand it?" "Why bother?" And so on.
Those are questions many artists, musicians, and other more soulful tradespeople probably hear all the time, and while the drive to fly and the drive to create or perform may seem to emanate from opposite hemispheres of the brain, there's a shared thread of inspiration -- that being, if nothing else, one of total ineffability. Ask where a pilot got his vocational mojo, and you're likely to invite blather about "passion" or "boyhood dreams," and Mom and Dad will start remembering that long before Patrick Smith could drive a car or dress himself for school, he could demonstrate how to tell a 727-100 from a 727-200 by the shape of its engine intakes.
All very stirring, and if pilots are beholden to anything, it's normally not a paycheck. Instead, it's something in our veins that assembled there in childhood. But in adulthood, with your checkbook bleeding, your body a mangle of circadian chaos, and an unsettling ability to tell a Holiday Inn Express from a La Quinta by the color of the in-room carpeting, those same visceral longings that felt magical at age 7, or even 27, can feel like a curse -- your dreams turning against you while holding better judgment hostage. Even as my long-sought career lies in shambles around me, I cannot make myself un-love commercial flight any more than I can make myself enjoy the taste of mushrooms.
You'll notice I say "commercial flight." For whether I consider myself more, or less, cerebral about flying than most pilots is open to debate. My enthrallment as a youngster was -- and remains -- with the workings of the airlines themselves. I have limited fascination with the sky; I feel no ecstatic glee at the breaking of any "surly bonds." In grade school I would pore over the system maps and timetables of Pan Am, Aeroflot, Lufthansa and British Airways, memorizing the names of the foreign capitals they flew to, then drawing up my own imaginary airlines and tracing out their intended routes. It was all about far-off countries and cultures, and I'd imagine flying to whichever of them at the controls of my favorite airplane, the 747, flagship of the world's fleets. The sight of a Piper Cub meant nothing to me. Five minutes at an air show watching the Thunderbirds do barrel rolls and I was bored to tears.
Airplanes helped me appreciate the world. They turned me on to geography, travel and culture. By studying the airlines as a kid, I was inspired, later in life, to visit places like Malaysia and Botswana and India. It was a direct connection, and my aim is to remind you of that potential. The disconnect between air travel and culture seems to me wholly unnatural, yet we've seen virtually a clean break. Nobody gives a damn anymore how you get there. I'll ask friends about the trips they take, always wanting to know which airline and aircraft they rode on. Often enough the answer is "I don't remember." A shame for the means to be so coldly separated from the ends, for people to find travel so valuable, important or enriching, but to find a certain irrelevancy in the tools that allow it to happen. For most, regardless of whether the destination is Kansas or Katmandu, the airplane is a necessary evil, incidental to the journey but no longer part of it.
Planes are complicated, sophisticated and, dare the biased enthusiast submit, beautiful (some of them). A lack of knowledge about the workings of planes can seem a bit, well, uncivilized, or even disrespectful to those who bestow passion on them. And that's not the adrenaline-charged passion some might feel at the sight of a motorcycle or muscle car, or the way a collector might coo lovingly while oiling the barrels of his rifles and handguns. Planes can be sexy, I say, but spare me anything trite about phalluses and hormones. I'm talking about a passion that takes all of humanity into account: the world's airlines bridging the continents, linking nations and peoples of the world. If that sounds hokey or far-fetched, I propose a stroll through the International Arrivals Building at Kennedy airport during the nightly transatlantic departure push.
And what's at the root of all this weepy culture bridging? The aircraft itself, the graceful ship docked outside that nobody is paying attention to. How many travelers with their passports full of stamps and visas can tell you the difference between an A340 and a 777? How many can tell you which is the world's oldest airline (KLM), the largest plane (still the 747), or whose face is up on the tail of EgyptAir (it's Horus, the ancient Egyptian sky god)?
I remember a former girlfriend of mine, an artist named Samantha, who, while she'd have no trouble appreciating the play of light in 17th century paintings by Vermeer, found my fondness for aircraft to be utterly perplexing. While I could see urbane elegance in the shape of a 747, or a heady significance in the color scheme of a prestigious airline, she analogized airplanes not as works of art themselves, but merely as the tool. The sky was the canvas, the plane nothing less discardable than the painter's brush. I disagree, for as a brush's stroke represents the moment of artistic inspiration, what is travel without the journey?
Opinions like these once got me called "a shill for the corporate bullshit airlines." I am not extolling the virtues of 17-inch seats or the culinary subtlety of half-ounce bags of snack mix. The idea is to show some beauty where you don't expect it. The indignities of flying aside, there are, at least for now, still many jewels, both aesthetic and existential, to be found. OK, flying sucks, but if you can't value the idea of zipping to Hong Kong in 12 hours in a million-pound machine, then there's a problem.
