Going Up?
I’m sitting in a Japan Airlines 747 somewhere between Tokyo and Singapore, but considerably closer to Tokyo. We just took off and, through the wonders of a camera mounted under the plane, I was treated to a view of the runway ahead and the ground below as we left it. The scene was displayed on a four foot wide screen at the front of the cabin, so you pretty much couldn’t miss it, and I have to say that there’s something slightly unnerving about watching the earth drop away from you like that. Normally when you take off you don’t think about the ground, about how hard it is and what a really bad idea it would be to drop on it from a great height, but watching it underneath like that gives you a real appreciation of the point of no return – that moment where you are off the ground and it’s too late to come back down nicely; you’re either going to take off successfully or perish in a thousand-degree fireball somewhere in those fields you can see ahead.
If this sounds unnecessarily pessimistic I blame Delta Airlines. I make dozens of flights every year and I always used to enjoy the taking off part. In fact I still remember the first flight I ever made, on a UK Air small plane. I don’t recall where the flight started or ended (other than that it was from the North of the UK to the South) but it was at night. The feeling of taxiing out, the plane turning onto the runway and all those exciting lights lining up as we straightened for take-off, the sudden rush as the engines propelled us forward and the lightness as we left the ground was so much better than plodding along the M1 motorway.
It’s not as noticeable in a bigger plane but it was still better than the rest of the flight, which typically involves fighting for the armrest with some fat bastard and waiting for three mouthfuls of cheap soda. Until I took a Delta Airlines flight from Brussels back to St.Louis, through their hub in Atlanta. I don’t fly Delta as a rule; those of you who read this journal regularly will note that I have been known to criticize American Airlines, who I usually fly, but compared to Delta they’re not bad. Delta are just shit.
We got into Atlanta, an airport that distinguished itself by having no power outlets anywhere that you could use to plug in your computer, in the pissing rain. When we eventually boarded the connection to St.Louis the plane was full. We did the whole “hurtling down the runway” thing just like usual but as we took off we didn’t seem to be gaining much height, and the plane was a bit wobblier than normal. Out of the window I could see the tops of buildings just below us – the corners looked very hard and pointy compared to the giant tin can that I now realized we were inhabiting. It turns out we’d lost power in an engine. (Good job we didn’t lose power in two engines or we’d have seen those buildings from the side, as we entered one). It seemed like an eternity as we wobbled around in the sky; the pilots announced that we were turning back but their message didn’t include any of the usual platitudes about how this was all “nothing to be concerned about”.
We landed with an accompanying phalanx of fire trucks but reverse thrust wasn’t an option with one engine out (I assume we’d have spun round in a circle) so we just skidded off the end of the runway and sat in the mud for an hour until they could get a truck with knobbly wheels to come and unload us. We even made the news in St.Louis (where there must have been fuck-all happening that day). From that moment on, I no longer approached take-off with the happy assumption that the big cigar-shaped metal coffin in which I was seated would make it into the air and stay there.
On the plus side, when Delta eventually secured us a new plane and we reboarded, there were suddenly, for some reason, a large number of empty seats. So if they fucked up the take-off again I might well have been incinerated in a fiery wreck, but at least I wouldn’t have been fighting a fat bastard for the armrest while it happened.
Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison
If this sounds unnecessarily pessimistic I blame Delta Airlines. I make dozens of flights every year and I always used to enjoy the taking off part. In fact I still remember the first flight I ever made, on a UK Air small plane. I don’t recall where the flight started or ended (other than that it was from the North of the UK to the South) but it was at night. The feeling of taxiing out, the plane turning onto the runway and all those exciting lights lining up as we straightened for take-off, the sudden rush as the engines propelled us forward and the lightness as we left the ground was so much better than plodding along the M1 motorway.
It’s not as noticeable in a bigger plane but it was still better than the rest of the flight, which typically involves fighting for the armrest with some fat bastard and waiting for three mouthfuls of cheap soda. Until I took a Delta Airlines flight from Brussels back to St.Louis, through their hub in Atlanta. I don’t fly Delta as a rule; those of you who read this journal regularly will note that I have been known to criticize American Airlines, who I usually fly, but compared to Delta they’re not bad. Delta are just shit.
We got into Atlanta, an airport that distinguished itself by having no power outlets anywhere that you could use to plug in your computer, in the pissing rain. When we eventually boarded the connection to St.Louis the plane was full. We did the whole “hurtling down the runway” thing just like usual but as we took off we didn’t seem to be gaining much height, and the plane was a bit wobblier than normal. Out of the window I could see the tops of buildings just below us – the corners looked very hard and pointy compared to the giant tin can that I now realized we were inhabiting. It turns out we’d lost power in an engine. (Good job we didn’t lose power in two engines or we’d have seen those buildings from the side, as we entered one). It seemed like an eternity as we wobbled around in the sky; the pilots announced that we were turning back but their message didn’t include any of the usual platitudes about how this was all “nothing to be concerned about”.
We landed with an accompanying phalanx of fire trucks but reverse thrust wasn’t an option with one engine out (I assume we’d have spun round in a circle) so we just skidded off the end of the runway and sat in the mud for an hour until they could get a truck with knobbly wheels to come and unload us. We even made the news in St.Louis (where there must have been fuck-all happening that day). From that moment on, I no longer approached take-off with the happy assumption that the big cigar-shaped metal coffin in which I was seated would make it into the air and stay there.
On the plus side, when Delta eventually secured us a new plane and we reboarded, there were suddenly, for some reason, a large number of empty seats. So if they fucked up the take-off again I might well have been incinerated in a fiery wreck, but at least I wouldn’t have been fighting a fat bastard for the armrest while it happened.
Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison
posted by Mr Bison at
3:35 PM
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