Airships

We air passengers are not accustomed to perceiving, or even imagining, planes in this way, as almost animate beings, with a capacity for suffering and endurance, requiring consideration and esteem, and being sensitive, almost, to gratitude and rancour. We board them and can barely distinguish between them; we know nothing of their age or their past history; we don’t even notice their names, which, in Spain at least, are chosen in such a bureaucratic, pious spirit, so lacking in poetry, adventure and imagination, that they’re hard to retain and recognize if ever we entrust ourselves to them again. I would like to ask Iberia, in this the twenty-first century, to abandon their anodyne patriotic gestures and adulatory nods to the Catholic Church – all those planes called Our Lady of the Pillar and Our Lady of Good Remedy, The City of Burgos and The City of Tarragona – and instead choose names that are more cheerful and more literary. I, for one, would feel safer and more reassured, more protected, if I knew I was flying in the The Red Eagle or The Fire Arrow or even Achilles or Emma Bovary or Falstaff or Liberty Valance or Nostromo.

Perhaps reading that air hostess’s epistolary revelations had something to do with the diminution of my fear. Until that comment of hers it had never occurred to me that captains might have a similar relationship with their planes as old seadogs do with their ships, and that air crews are like sailors. Perhaps the things that surprised and disturbed me during my long watches as a fearful traveller – a murmur, a squeak, a bump, a lurch – were perfectly recognizable to them, familiar, customary, the reactions of each individualized and distinguishable plane, just as we recognize the people close to us by their gestures and intonations, their silences and vacillations, so much so that, often, we don’t even need them to speak to know what’s wrong, what’s going through their minds, what they’re suffering or worrying about or plotting or waiting for.

This possibility soothes me. We live in an age that tends to depersonalize even people and is, in principle, averse to anthropomorphism. Indeed, such a tendency is often criticized, erroneously and foolishly in my view, since that ‘rapprochement’ between the human and the non-human is quite natural and spontaneous, and far from being an attempt to deprive animals, plants and objects of their respective selves, it places them in the category of the ‘humanizable’, which is, for us, the highest and most respectable of categories.

I know people who talk to, question, spoil, threaten or even quarrel with their computers, saying things like: ‘Right now, you behave yourself,’ or thanking them for their help. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s perfectly understandable. In fact, given how often we travel in planes, the odd thing about our relationship with them – those complex machines endowed with movement to which we surrender ourselves and that transport us through the air – is that it isn’t more ‘personal’, or more ‘animal’, or more ‘sailor-like’, if you prefer. Perhaps those who crew them haven’t known how to communicate this to us. I’ve never seen them pat a plane, as you might pat a horse to calm or reward it; I’ve never seen planes being groomed and cleaned and tidied, except very hurriedly and impatiently; I’ve never seen them loved as Conrad’s captain loved his sunken brig; I’ve never seen air hostesses – who spend a lot of time on-board – treat them with the respect and care, at once fatherly and comradely, enjoyed by ships.

That’s what I would like to see, less cool efficiency and more affection, and I’m sure that I, along with many other tense, vigilant passengers, would become infected by their confidence and be able to relax, because then planes, like ships in the old days, would have their ‘reputation’, and we would know something of their voyages, their history, their deeds, their past and their future. The pilots, instead of frightening us with their usual litany of cold, hair-raising facts (‘We will be flying at an absurdly high altitude, the temperature outside is unbelievably cold, etc.’), could say: ‘This plane, the Pierre Ménard, has had an amazing life so far. It was born ten years ago, has made five hundred flights and crossed the Atlantic on sixty-three previous occasions. It has always responded well to us, even in the most unfavourable of circumstances. It’s a docile plane by nature, but very sensitive as well. Why, I remember once…’

Well, I leave the rest up to the airlines. Perhaps it isn’t too much to ask for a little more literature or – which comes to the same thing – a little uniqueness; a little history and background; a little life.