Member-only story
Why It’s Good to Look Up Occasionally
How a giant of the skies can alter your perspective on life
My tutor was a little ahead of me, at the top of the hill. I’d stopped to wipe sheep poo off my shoe.
“Look!” he said, pointing straight up. A Boeing 747 was about 3,000 meters above his head, on its way from Leeds Airport to some unknown destination, an aluminium cylinder filled with perhaps 300 living people.
He gazed at the aircraft as it thundered overhead.
“I’m an engineer,” he said, half to himself, “and I understand all about thrust and weight ratios, bypass ratios, lift and vortices. But the real reason that something weighing 20,000 tonnes of metal can fly is very simple: it’s pure magic.”
I shared his sense of wonder. Though I’d been flying since before I could remember, it never ceased to amaze me that we can step onto an airplane in one part of the world and step off in another as though it were the most perfectly normal thing to do.
One hundred years ago a journey from Paris to San Francisco would have taken weeks; today it requires a mere eleven hours in a relatively comfortable seat (yes, even Cattle Class seating is luxurious compared to a wooden bench in a jarring stagecoach hour after hour with no refreshments and no lavatory available).
