“You can have the drive and desire, but not the skills, that’s very different than having the skills, and not using them.”
- Joseph Ferrari
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Alaine de Button, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary
(excerpts i enjoyed)
Despite the many achievements of aeronautical engineers over the last few decades, the period before boarding an aircraft is still statistically more likely to be the prelude to a catastrophe than a quiet day in front of the television at home. It therefore tends to raise questions about how we might best spend the last moments before our disintegration, in what frame of mind we might wish to fall back down to Earth — and the extent to which we would like to meet eternity surrounded by an array of duty-free bags.
Just beyond the security area was a suite, named after an ill-fated supersonic jet and reserved for the use of first-class passengers. There were leather armchairs, fireplaces, marble bathrooms, a spa, a restaurant, a concierge, a manicurist and a hairdresser. One waiter toured the lounge with plates of complimentary caviar and smoked salmon, while a second made circuits with éclairs and strawberry tartlets.
“For what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? What is the end of the pursuit of wealth, power and pre-eminence?” asked Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), going on to answer: “To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation” — a set of ambitions to which the creators of the Concorde Room had responded with stirring precision.
As I took a seat in the restaurant, I felt certain that whatever it had taken for humanity to arrive at this point had ultimately been worth it. Still, I recognised the fragility of the achievement behind the lounge. I sensed how relatively few such halcyon days there might be left before members of the small fraternity ensconced in its armchairs came to grief and its gilded ceilings cracked into ruin.
Perhaps it had felt a bit like this on the terraces of Hadrian’s villa outside Rome on autumn Sunday evenings in the second century AD, as a blood-red sun set over the marble colonnades.
From the outset, my employer had suggested that I might wish to conduct a brief interview with one of the most powerful men in the terminal: the head of British Airways, Willie Walsh. It was a daunting prospect, as Walsh was having a busy time of it. His company was losing an average of £1.6m a day, a total of £148m over the previous three months. His pilots and cabin crew were planning strikes. Studies showed that his baggage handlers misappropriated more luggage than their counterparts at any other European airline. The government wanted to tax his fuel. Environmental activists had been chaining themselves to his fences. He had done away with the free chocolates after every meal in business class, and in the process provoked a three-day furore in the British press.
Fortunately, I had come to the conclusion that though Mr Walsh was the CEO of one of the world’s largest airlines, it would be wholly unfair of me to treat him like a businessman. Considered collectively, civil aviation had never in its history shown a profit. Just as significantly, neither had book publishing. In this sense, then, the CEO and I, despite our apparent differences, were in much the same sort of business, each one needing to justify itself in the eyes of humanity not so much by its bottom line as by its ability to stir the soul.
The stock market could never put an accurate price on the thousands of moments of beauty and interest that occurred around the world every day under an airline’s banner: it could not describe the sight of Nova Scotia from the air; it had no means of quantifying the adrenaline thrill of take-off.
The logic of my argument was not lost on Mr Walsh, who had himself once been a pilot. As we talked, he expressed his admiration for the way planes could defy their size and the challenges of the atmosphere to soar into the sky. We remarked on the surprise we felt on seeing a 747 at a gate, dwarfing luggage carts and mechanics, at the idea that such a leviathan could move a few metres, let alone cross the Himalayas. We exclaimed over the beauty of a crowded airfield, where, through the heat haze of turbofans, one can make out sequences of planes waiting to begin their journeys, their fins a confusion of colours against the grey horizon, like sails at a regatta.
Emboldened, I asked whether, if he had any money left, he might consider appointing me his writer-in-flight,
in order that I might constantly circumnavigate the Earth composing, among other things, sincere dedications to my patron, impressionistic essays describing the ochre colours of the Western Australian desert as seen from the flight deck, and vignettes recounting the balletic routines of the stewards in the galley.
There was a pause, and for a moment the bonhomie disappeared from the chief executive’s eyes. But it soon returned. “Of course,” he beamed. “Once at Aer Lingus, the video system broke down, and we invited a couple of Irish minstrels to sing songs on a flight to New York. Alan, I could see you at the front of the cabin doing a ditty or two.” And then he apologised for taking up so much of my precious time and called for a security officer to escort me to the door of his corporate headquarters
http://www.alainedebutton.com/
Despite the many achievements of aeronautical engineers over the last few decades, the period before boarding an aircraft is still statistically more likely to be the prelude to a catastrophe than a quiet day in front of the television at home. It therefore tends to raise questions about how we might best spend the last moments before our disintegration, in what frame of mind we might wish to fall back down to Earth — and the extent to which we would like to meet eternity surrounded by an array of duty-free bags.
Just beyond the security area was a suite, named after an ill-fated supersonic jet and reserved for the use of first-class passengers. There were leather armchairs, fireplaces, marble bathrooms, a spa, a restaurant, a concierge, a manicurist and a hairdresser. One waiter toured the lounge with plates of complimentary caviar and smoked salmon, while a second made circuits with éclairs and strawberry tartlets.
“For what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? What is the end of the pursuit of wealth, power and pre-eminence?” asked Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), going on to answer: “To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation” — a set of ambitions to which the creators of the Concorde Room had responded with stirring precision.
As I took a seat in the restaurant, I felt certain that whatever it had taken for humanity to arrive at this point had ultimately been worth it. Still, I recognised the fragility of the achievement behind the lounge. I sensed how relatively few such halcyon days there might be left before members of the small fraternity ensconced in its armchairs came to grief and its gilded ceilings cracked into ruin.
Perhaps it had felt a bit like this on the terraces of Hadrian’s villa outside Rome on autumn Sunday evenings in the second century AD, as a blood-red sun set over the marble colonnades.
From the outset, my employer had suggested that I might wish to conduct a brief interview with one of the most powerful men in the terminal: the head of British Airways, Willie Walsh. It was a daunting prospect, as Walsh was having a busy time of it. His company was losing an average of £1.6m a day, a total of £148m over the previous three months. His pilots and cabin crew were planning strikes. Studies showed that his baggage handlers misappropriated more luggage than their counterparts at any other European airline. The government wanted to tax his fuel. Environmental activists had been chaining themselves to his fences. He had done away with the free chocolates after every meal in business class, and in the process provoked a three-day furore in the British press.
Fortunately, I had come to the conclusion that though Mr Walsh was the CEO of one of the world’s largest airlines, it would be wholly unfair of me to treat him like a businessman. Considered collectively, civil aviation had never in its history shown a profit. Just as significantly, neither had book publishing. In this sense, then, the CEO and I, despite our apparent differences, were in much the same sort of business, each one needing to justify itself in the eyes of humanity not so much by its bottom line as by its ability to stir the soul.
The stock market could never put an accurate price on the thousands of moments of beauty and interest that occurred around the world every day under an airline’s banner: it could not describe the sight of Nova Scotia from the air; it had no means of quantifying the adrenaline thrill of take-off.
The logic of my argument was not lost on Mr Walsh, who had himself once been a pilot. As we talked, he expressed his admiration for the way planes could defy their size and the challenges of the atmosphere to soar into the sky. We remarked on the surprise we felt on seeing a 747 at a gate, dwarfing luggage carts and mechanics, at the idea that such a leviathan could move a few metres, let alone cross the Himalayas. We exclaimed over the beauty of a crowded airfield, where, through the heat haze of turbofans, one can make out sequences of planes waiting to begin their journeys, their fins a confusion of colours against the grey horizon, like sails at a regatta.
Emboldened, I asked whether, if he had any money left, he might consider appointing me his writer-in-flight,
in order that I might constantly circumnavigate the Earth composing, among other things, sincere dedications to my patron, impressionistic essays describing the ochre colours of the Western Australian desert as seen from the flight deck, and vignettes recounting the balletic routines of the stewards in the galley.
There was a pause, and for a moment the bonhomie disappeared from the chief executive’s eyes. But it soon returned. “Of course,” he beamed. “Once at Aer Lingus, the video system broke down, and we invited a couple of Irish minstrels to sing songs on a flight to New York. Alan, I could see you at the front of the cabin doing a ditty or two.” And then he apologised for taking up so much of my precious time and called for a security officer to escort me to the door of his corporate headquarters
http://www.alainedebutton.com/
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