How to Fly

The missing are so many. I think of them as limbo people, stranded in some wide departure lounge of the afterlife, bluish phantoms touched with ozone and jet fuel. Otis Redding and Glenn Miller are sitting together by a window, talking about music; Thomas Selfridge, the first man to die in an aircraft accident (September 1908), is having a drink with Admiral Yamamoto and Leslie Howard; Buddy Holly is flirting with Carole Lombard. In another of the many seating areas, Dag Hammarskjöld and Yuri Gagarin are discussing history; while Patsy Kline is surprised to find that she has so much in common with Rocky Marciano. Ronnie VanZant and Steve Gaines are forming an a capella singing group with Jim Reeves and Ricky Nelson. It’s a crowded space, and everybody here is waiting for his or her own particular flight, though whether they are going back to where they came from, to start again in a different guise, or are on the way to some other, quite unknown destination is impossible to tell.

For particularly mundane reasons, I’ve spent the last twenty-odd years of my life on aeroplanes. This came under the heading of business travel, mostly: another step away from being an aviator, and even lower than passenger status. Yet, oddly enough, such a debased form of air travel was exactly what I needed, in order to investigate the metaphysical possibilities of flying. Who is more invisible than the business traveller? In an airport, who do we notice: the pretty girl with the rucksack, the young Indian family travelling halfway around the world to visit friends in Pittsburgh, or the man in the grey suit? If the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, then my first step was to vanish into the crowds at the airport, the man nobody saw, the one who slipped through unnoticed, a non-first-class, unaccompanied, middle-management type, one of those people with nothing to say and no one to say it to. It was wonderful. I would sit by the window and gaze out as the plane prepared to touch down at Schiphol or JFK, and I would register, with infinite care, the usual details: the airport buildings; the lights; the fields around the runway; the rather pretty, oddly provincial sprawl of Long Island. Every now and then, something different would happen, or I would be overwhelmed by the strange beauty of the descent: the endless simmer of Buenos Aires, say, and the great silted mass of La Plata; the sudden apprehension of the Pacific, as the plane headed into San Francisco; the giddy sense of archipelago that came and went in an instant, just above Copenhagen. Finally, no matter where I touched down, there was always the feeling, as I recovered my bags and headed for the exit, that I was in a place where nobody knew me, a place where I could simply disappear. I could walk to the rank, get into the first taxi and go somewhere other than where I was supposed to go. There was a fictitious account running in my head, of a man more or less identical to me, who would be observed getting on to the shuttle bus, in a dark raincoat, carrying a brown leather bag, somewhat tired, perhaps, or a little preoccupied, but not looking or acting in any way out of the ordinary: just a man getting on or off the shuttle bus, never to be seen again. By now, there was more room to disappear. People took less notice; the world was less accountable. Eventually, in principle, it wouldn’t matter if I disappeared or not. I could keep my appointments, I could return my rented car on time and catch the flight home, and I still wasn’t entirely there — and this is why the real pioneers weren’t Orville and Wilbur Wright, or Louis Blériot, or Charles Lindbergh, but Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Because the real accomplishment of the twentieth century wasn’t, as Ferris put it, that ‘Man has learned how to fly!’, it was that, quietly, and with no sense of a breakthrough, people were learning how to vanish.