by Richard Farr
I’m writing this 37,000 feet above Vestmannaeyjar, a chain of islands off Iceland’s south coast. Or so the screen tells me – I can’t see the view because I’m wedged into 38E, a middle seat at the back near the loos. The ambient noise and vibration are roughly what you’d experience with your back to the railing at Niagara. As if pleased with the roar, this part of the airframe wags intermittently, like the rear end of a hopeful dog. Objects made of metal have no right to be this flexible – especially not airtight objects that are essentially several thousand small tin trays tacked together. (Welded? Bolted? Riveted? What is a rivet anyway? How is it possible to reach my age with essentially no idea what a rivet is?)
When I read Simon Winchester’s history of engineering, The Perfectionists, I must have missed the bit about rivets, but I did learn that the turbine blades in a jet engine have to be manufactured by advanced magi of the alchemical arts, who employ exotic alloys and mind-bogglingly fine tolerances to fight metal’s very natural desire to melt or shatter when spun at ferocious speeds inside a furnace. I try not to think about the fact that a manufacturing imperfection the size of a flea’s toenail could get me into a news story.
According to my watch we’re at 6,000 feet, but that’s only an indication of the lowered cabin pressure. It’s nothing, from a climber’s point of view, but presumably it explains why my head hurts, my hands look like a pair of lizard skin gloves, and half the passengers are farting.
A quarter century ago, also traveling from Heathrow to Seattle, I was in exactly this sliver of airspace and did see the view. My young sons being adorable, they and I were invited to come forward, visit the cockpit, and meet the pilots. We were on a 747, either a 200 or 300 series presumably since they still had an engineer in addition to the two pilots. My sons were mesmerized by the avionics, and also by the fact that the engineer at his sideways-facing console had a Wallace and Gromit coffee mug. My own focus of attention, after admiring the six-mile drop, was the view directly ahead: a pale white wall of lethally cold nothing, towards which we were hurtling at a substantial fraction of the speed of sound. The co-pilot had gone for a pee. The captain and engineer were both bantering with my sons and neither was looking out the front. It was terrifying. What would happen if a slow-moving London double-decker lumbered into view from behind a cloud?
Today nobody gets to visit the cockpit, especially not someone like me, who has no little boys in tow and bought the class of seat that comes with a surcharge for breathing. Not that I want to breathe, mind you: the air back here smells worse than the back wall of a country pub after a barn dance. And the man with his elbow in my ribs, one of the farters, keeps coughing without covering his mouth.
This aircraft is a 777. Living near Seattle should make me a fan of Boeing, but in recent years and days those loyalties have been tested. I glance at the nearest window seat and am glad not to be in it. My thoughts drift from failed door plugs to the 737-MAX, and from there to what a local journalist wittily dubbed the Dreamsmoker. A question for further research: has anyone yet tried to calculate the total cost of hiring executives who were going to save the company money?
With a quick check before stowing the phone for takeoff I was able to confirm that the 777 has been in the sky since 1995. Surely this one is more recent? I try not to think about it. Further quick checks on the tarmac in London indicated that we are burning about five gallons of jet fuel per mile. On this flight my personal contribution to the choked and coughing troposphere will be ten times my own body weight in carbon dioxide. I try not to think about that either.
There are 133 movies on offer, of which I’ve seen four; for some reason I can’t muster any enthusiasm for the others. In theory I could read my e-book, but all my current reads are library downloads and a perky message informs me that all of them have, mysteriously, been returned early.
Luckily by chance I have an actual, physical New York Review of Books in my bag. I spend a couple of hours distracted from aviation mechanics by reading it from cover to cover; among other things I learn a great deal about Robert Louis Stevenson’s essays, Byron’s sex life, Alexei Navalny’s tactical brilliance in fighting the disease that eventually killed him, and political sepsis of a similar kind in Indonesia. Looking around the cabin, I catch myself experiencing complicated feelings about the fact that, uniquely, my reading is in the antique format of a newspaper. We gave up our New York Times a year ago when it was no longer possible to get it delivered regularly; after a lifetime of real newspapers, and despite the myriad reasons the Gray Lady irritated me, I still miss her deeply. What a privilege and a half-forgotten joy it is then, to spend a few hours reading intelligent writing about the issues of the day, and of other days, in long form, without pop-ups or hyperlinks, untethered from the little glowing stone that we’re supposed to think Steve Jobs a genius for having set loose upon us.
(How am I writing the words you are reading? Given that last remark, surely in the tattered Moleskine notebook of travel writer legend? But no. Bruce Chatwin, Norman Lewis, Laurie Lee, Freya Stark and Robert Byron – all writers I idolized when I first got the itch – are probably turning in their graves: I’m writing with my thumbs, on my little glowing stone. )
The cabin crew seem overworked, unsure of themselves, frazzled. They completely missed our section with the drinks trolley at lunch. I was looking forward to a glass of cheap red to go with my tin coffin of pasta, because it might have cut the greasiness while proving mildly anesthetic. But one of the Stoics says somewhere that you should treasure these moments of everyday deprivation, because they offer you an opportunity to practice your immunity to fortune. Ok then: No doubt I’m better off without the wine anyway. I scoff at these bodily desires. The wine is nothing to me. Nothing!
Speaking of acceptance, stories of bad passenger behavior are legion but I see no grounds for draconian measures today. On the contrary I’m once again amazed by the patience people reveal in these conditions. Once settled, many of them wrap a blanket around themselves, retreat behind their shades and headphones, and slump motionless for the full duration, like gelatinous sea creatures attaching themselves to an abyssal rock. Me? I’m skinny, flexible and decently fit, but I squirm constantly, find the confinement in one position almost immediately unbearable, and always pick an aisle if possible so that I can get up regularly. Often I spend most of the flight standing at the back, getting in the way of the stewards, stretching or reading.
I’m not really all that much of a nervous flier but I do hate landing. An object that weighs three-quarters of a million pounds should not be able to get into the air in the first place – the concept of lift, which I have tried to understand in real technical depth by e.g. reading the Wikipedia article, is clearly nothing but a story that engineers with a sense of humor invented to tease the gullible. But it seems even more implausible that after relying on magic for ten hours we can thump onto the tarmac at 150 mph, fail to tip sideways or collapse the landing gear or cartwheel off the end of the runway in a halo of flame, and after only a few alarming noises come safely to a stop.
“Welcome to Seattle, where as always it’s 50 degrees fahrenheit with a light drizzle. The local time is …”
I block my ears. The local time is another thing I don’t want to think about.
*
One day later: I now know what a rivet is.
Two days later: Mastering the Costs-to-Boeing-from-Major-Recent-Screwups question, on the other hand, is like trying to bushwhack my way through a trackless financial jungle armed only with a paring knife. I admit defeat after less than an hour and can only say: tens of billions. This puts executive compensation in some perspective. David Calhoun, who recently said he would step down as CEO in the wake of the most recent SNAFU, was only costing the company about $20 million a year in compensation. So you’d have to pay at least ten such executives that much, for at least 100 years, to even come close to the price of messing up a once-unassailable engineering culture. Some economists like to defend the American taste for stratospheric executive pay. Now I see that in a way they have a point: it’s a rounding error.
Three days later: I have aches, chills, a thick cough and a bad headache. I could have worn a mask on the flight but like my 350 fellow passengers I couldn’t be bothered. At least it’s not COVID. I blame the man with the elbow.