A Week at the Airport

by Alain De Botton

  There is no need for such prostration now. A batch of twenty thousand cutlets, which had once, if only briefly, been attached to lambs born and nursed on Welsh hillsides, was driven into the depot. Within hours, with the addition of a breadcrumb topping, a portion of these would metamorphose into meals that would be eaten over Nigeria – with no thought or thanks given to their author, twenty-six-year-old Ruta from Lithuania.

  7 The British Airways flight crews also maintained offices at the airport. In an operations room in Terminal 5, pilots stopped by throughout the day and into the evening to consult with their managers about what the weather was like over Mongolia, or how much fuel they ought to purchase in Rio. When I saw an opening, I introduced myself to Senior First Officer Mike Norcock, who had been flying for fifteen years and who greeted me with one of those wry, indulgent smiles often bestowed by professionals upon people with a more artistic calling. In his presence, I felt like a child unsure of his father’s affections. I realised that meeting pilots was doomed to escalate into an ever more humiliating experience for me, as the older I got, the more obvious it became that I would never be able to acquire the virtues that I so admired in them – their steadfastness, courage, decisiveness, logic and relevance – and must instead forever remain a hesitant and inadequate creature who would almost certainly start weeping if asked to land a 777 amid foggy ground conditions in Newfoundland.

  Norcock had come to the operations room to pick up some route maps. He was off to India in his jumbo but first wanted to double-check the weather over Iran’s northern border. He knew so much that his passengers did not. He understood, for example, that the sky, which we laypeople so casually and naively tend to appraise in terms of its colour and cloud formations, was in fact criss-crossed by coded flight lanes, intersections, junctions and beacon signals. On this day, he was especially concerned with VAN115.2, both a small orange dot on the flight charts and a wooden shed two metres high and five across, situated on the edge of a farmer’s field at the top of a gorge in a thinly inhabited part of eastern Turkey – a location where Norcock would in a few hours be taking a left fork on to airway R659, as his passengers anxiously anticipated their lunch, a lasagne being prepared even now in Gate Gourmet’s factory. I looked at his steady, well-sculpted hands and thought of how far he had come since childhood.

  I knew, at least in theory, that Norcock could not always, in every circumstance, be a model of authoritative and patriarchal behaviour. He, too, must be capable of petulance, of vanity, of acting foolishly, of making casually cruel remarks to his spouse or neglecting to understand his children. There are no directional charts for daily life. But at the same time, I was reluctant to either accept or exploit the implications of this knowledge. I wanted to believe in the capacity of certain professions to enable us to escape the ordinary run of our frailties and to accede, if only for a moment, to a more impressive sort of existence than most of us will ever know.

  8 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 £1.6 million a day, a total of £148 million 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 infuriated those in the upper echelons at Boeing by telling them that he would not be able to keep up with the prepayment schedule he had committed to for the new 787 aircraft he had ordered. His efforts to merge his airline with Qantas and Iberia had stalled. He had done away with the free chocolates handed round after every meal in business class, and in the process provoked a three-day furore in the British press.

  Journalism has long been enamoured of the idea of the interview, beneath which lies a fantasy about access: a remote figure, beyond the reach of the ordinary public and otherwise occupied with running the world, opens up and reveals his innermost self to a correspondent. With admission set at the price of a newspaper, the audience is invited to forget their station in life and accompany the interviewer into the palace or the executive suite. The guards lay down their weapons, the secretaries wave the visitors through. Now we are in the inner sanctum. While waiting, we have a look around. We learn that the president likes to keep a bowl of peppermints on his desk, or that the leading actress has been reading Dickens.

  But the tantalising promise of shared secrets is rarely fulfilled as we might wish, for it is almost never in the interests of a prominent figure to become intimate with a member of the press. He has better people on to whom to unburden himself. He does not need a new friend. He is not going to disclose his plots for vengeance or his fears about his professional future. For the celebrity, the interview is thus generally reduced to an exercise in saying as little as possible without confounding the self-love of the journalist on the sofa, who might become dangerous if rendered too starkly aware of the futility of his mission. In a bid to appease the underlying demand for closeness, the subject may let it drop that he is about to go on holiday to Florida, or that his daughter is learning how to play tennis.

  There was evidently nothing of standard consequence that I could ask Mr Walsh. There was no point in my bringing up pensions, carbon emissions, premium yields or even the much-missed chocolates – no point, really, in our meeting at all, had not events reached the stage where articulating this insight would have seemed rude.

  So we got together for forty minutes in a conference room, between Mr Walsh’s meeting with a trade-union representative and a delegation from Airbus. I felt as if I were interrupting a discussion of beachheads between Roosevelt and Churchill in May 1943.

  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. The fiscal state of his company was simply too precarious, and too woefully inaccurate a reflection of his talents and interests, to permit me to confuse Mr Walsh with his balance sheet.

  Considered collectively, as a cohesive industry, 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. It seemed as unfair to evaluate an airline according to its profit-and-loss statement as to judge a poet by her royalty statements. 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 room in its optics for the camaraderie enjoyed by employees in the Hong Kong ticket office, it had no means of quantifying the adrenalin-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, vast and complicated machines, could defy their size and the challenges of the atmosphere to soar into the sky. We remarked on the surprise we both 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’ distance, let alone across the Himalayas. We reflected on the pleasure of seeing a 777 take off for New York and, over the Staines reservoir, retract its flaps and wheels, which it would not require again until its descent over the white clapboard houses of Long Beach, some 5,000 kilometres and six hours of sea and cloud away. We exclaimed over the beauty of a crowded airfield, where, through the heat haze of turbofans, the interested observer 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. In another life
, I decided, the chief executive and I might have become good friends.

  We were getting on so well that Mr Walsh – or Willie, as he now urged me to call him – suggested we repair to the lobby downstairs, where we could have a look at a model of the new A380, twelve of which he had ordered from Airbus and which would be joining the British Airways fleet in 2012. Once we were standing before it, Willie, with what seemed a child’s sense of delight, invited me to join him in climbing up on to a bench to appreciate the sheer scale of the jet’s ailerons and the breadth of its fuselage.

  So much warmth did I feel for him as we stood shoulder to shoulder, admiring his model plane, that I was emboldened to mention a fantasy I had harboured since I first received authorisation to write a book about Heathrow. I asked Willie whether, if he had any money left, he might one day 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 handsome grey-green eyes. But soon enough it returned. ‘Of course,’ he said, beaming. ‘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 for our passengers.’ And following that prognostication, 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.

  9 Not long into my stay, evening became my favourite time at the airport. By eight, most of the choppy short-haul European traffic had come and gone. The terminal was emptying out, Caviar House was selling the last of its sturgeon eggs and the cleaning teams were embarking on the day’s most systematic mopping of the floors. Because it was summer, the sun would not set for another forty minutes, and in the interim a gentle, nostalgic light would flood across the seating areas.

  The majority of the passengers left in the terminal at this hour were booked on one or another of the flights that departed every evening for the East, unbeknownst to most of the households of north-west London which they crossed en route for Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo and Bangkok.

  The atmosphere in the waiting areas was lonely, but curiously, the feeling was benign for being so general, eliminating the unease that any one individual might otherwise experience at being the only one to be alone, and thus paradoxically making new connections seem possible in a way they might not have done in the more obviously convivial surroundings of a crowded city bar. At night, the airport emerged as a home of nomadic spirits, types who could not commit to any one country, who shied from tradition and were suspicious of settled community, and who were therefore nowhere more comfortable than in the intermediate zones of the modern world, landscapes gashed by kerosene storage tanks, business parks and airport hotels.

  Because the arrival of night typically pulls us back towards the hearth, there seemed something especially brave about travellers who were preparing to entrust themselves to the darkness, to be carried in a craft navigated by instruments alone and to surrender to sleep, finally, only over Azerbaijan or the Kalahari Desert.

  In a control room beside the terminal, a giant map of the world showed the real-time position of every plane in the British Airways fleet, as tracked by a string of satellites. Across the globe, 180 aircraft were on their way, together holding some one hundred thousand passengers. A dozen planes were crossing the North Atlantic, five were routing around a hurricane to the west of Bermuda, and one could be seen plotting a course over Papua New Guinea. The map was emblematic of a touching vigilance, for however far removed each craft was from its home airfield, however untethered and able it looked, it was never far from the minds of those in the control room in London, who, like parents worrying about their children, would not feel at ease until each of their charges had safely touched down.

  Every night a few planes would be towed away from their gates to a set of giant hangars, where a phalanx of gangways and cranes would lock themselves around their organically shaped bodies like a series of handcuffs. While aircraft tended to be coy about their need to pay such visits – hardly letting on, at the close of a trip from Los Angeles or Hong Kong, that they had reached the very end of their permitted quota of nine hundred flying hours – the checks provided an opportunity for them to reveal their individuality. What to passengers might have looked like yet another indistinguishable 747 would emerge, during this process, as a machine with a distinct name and medical history: G-BNLH, for example, had come into service in 1990 and in the intervening years had had three hydraulic leaks over the Atlantic, once blown a tyre in San Francisco and, only the previous week, dropped an apparently unimportant part of its wing in Cape Town. Now it was coming into the hangar with, among other ailments, twelve malfunctioning seats, a large smear of purple nail polish on a wall panel and an opinionated microwave oven in a rear galley that ignited itself whenever an adjacent basin was used.

  Thirty men would work on the plane through the night, the whole operation guided by an awareness that, while the craft could under most circumstances be extraordinarily forgiving, a chain of events originating in the failure of something as small as a single valve could nevertheless bring it down, just as a career might be ruined by one incautious remark, or a person die because of a clot less than a millimetre across.

  I toured the exterior of the aircraft on a gangway that ran around its midriff and let my hands linger on its nose cone, which had only a few hours earlier carved a path through dense layers of static cumulus clouds.

  Studying the plane’s tapered tail, and the marks left across the back of its fuselage by the enraged thrust of its four RB211 engines, I wondered if scientists and engineers might have designed planes and their means of take-off differently had our species been graced with some subtler, less thunderous mode of conception, perhaps one managed frictionlessly and quietly by the male’s sitting for a few hours on an egg left behind in a leafy recess by the female.

  10 At around eleven-fifteen each night, by government decree, the airport was closed to both incoming and outgoing traffic. Across the aprons, all was suddenly as quiet as it must have been a hundred years ago, when there was nothing here but sheep meadows and apple farms. I met up with a man called Terry, whose job it was to tour the runways in the early hours looking out for stray bits of metal. We drove out to a spot at the end of the southern runway, 27L to pilots, which Terry termed the most expensive piece of real estate in Europe. It was here, at forty-second intervals throughout the day, on a patch of tarmac only a few metres square and black with rubber left by tyres, that the aircraft of the world made their first contact with the British Isles. This was the exact set of coordinates that planes anticipated from across southern England: even in the thickest fog, their automatic landing systems could pick up the glide-path beam that was projected up into the sky from this point, the radio wave calling them to place their wheels squarely in the centre of a zone highlighted by a double line of parallel white lights.

  But just now, the patch of runway that was almost solely responsible for destroying the peace and quiet of some ten million people was becalmed. One could walk unhurriedly across it and even give in to the temptation to sit cross-legged on its centreline, a gesture that partook of some of the sublime thrill of touching a disconnected high-voltage electricity cable, running one’s fingers along the teeth of an anaesthetised shark or having a wash in a fallen dictator’s marble bathroom.

  A field mouse scurried out of the grass and on to the runway, where for a moment it stood still, transfixed by the jeep’s headlamps. It was of a kind which regularly populates children’s books, where mice are always clever and good-natured creatures who live in small houses with red-and-w
hite-checked curtains, in sharp contrast to the boorish humans, who are clumsily oversized and unaware of their own limits. Its presence this night on the moonlit tarmac served optimistically to suggest that when mankind is finished with flying – or more generally, with being – the earth will retain a capacity to absorb our follies and make way for more modest forms of life.

  11 Terry dropped me off at my hotel. I felt too stimulated to sleep – and so went for a drink at an all-night bar frequented by delayed flight crews and passengers.

  Over a dramatically sized tequila-based cocktail named an After Burner, I befriended a young woman who told me that she was writing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Warsaw: her subject was the Polish poet and novelist Zygmunt Krasiński, with a particular focus on his famous work Agaj-Han (1834) and the tragic themes explored therein. She argued that Krasiński’s reputation had been unfairly eclipsed during the twentieth century by that of his fellow Romantic writer Adam Mickiewicz, and explained that she had been motivated in her research by a desire to reacquaint her compatriots with an aspect of their heritage that had been deliberately denied them during the Communist era. When I asked why she was at the airport, she replied that she had come to meet a friend from Dubai, whose plane had been delayed and was now unlikely to land at Heathrow before mid-morning. An engineer of Lebanese origin, he had been coming to London once a month for the past year and a half in order to receive treatment for throat cancer at a private hospital in Marylebone, and during every visit, he invited her to spend the night with him in a Prestige Suite on the top floor of the Sofitel. She confided that she was registered with an agency which had a head office in Hayes and added, in a not unrelated aside, that Zygmunt Krasiński had conducted a three-year-long affair with the Countess Delfina Potocka, with whom Chopin had also been in love.