A Week at the Airport - Alain De Botton [21]
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