A Week at the Airport - Alain De Botton [4]
3 In the end it was a 5.30 a.m. arrival (BA flight from Hong Kong) that called a halt to my perturbed night. I showered, ate a fruit bar purchased from a dispensing machine in the car park and wandered over to an observation area next to the terminal. In the cloudless dawn, a sequence of planes, each visible as a single diamond, were lined up at different heights, like pupils in a school photo, on their final approach to the northern runway. Their wings unfolded themselves into elaborate and unlikely arrangements of irregularly sized steel-grey panels. Having avoided the earth for so long, wheels that had last touched ground in San Francisco or Mumbai hesitated and slowed almost to a standstill as they arched and prepared to greet the rubber-stained English tarmac with a burst of smoke that made manifest their planes’ speed and weight.
With the aggressive whistling of their engines, the airborne visitors appeared to be rebuking this domestic English morning for its somnolence, like a delivery person unable to resist pressing a little too insistently and vengefully on the doorbell of a still-slumbering household. All around them, the M4 corridor was waking up reluctantly. Kettles were being switched on in Reading, shirts being ironed in Slough and children unfurling themselves beneath their Thomas the Tank Engine duvets in Staines.
Yet for the passengers in the 747 now nearing the airfield, the day was already well advanced. Many would have awakened several hours before to see their plane crossing over Thurso at the northernmost tip of Scotland, nearly the end of the earth to those in London’s suburbs, but their destination’s very doorstep for travellers after a long night’s journey over the Canadian icelands and a moonlit North Pole. Breakfast would have kept time with the airliner’s progress down the spine of the kingdom: a struggle with a small box of cornflakes over Edinburgh, an omelette studded with red peppers and mushrooms near Newcastle, a stab at a peculiar-looking fruit yoghurt over the unknowing Yorkshire Dales.
For British Airways planes, the approach to Terminal 5 was a return to their home base, equivalent to the final run up the Plymouth Sound for their eighteenth-century naval predecessors. Having long been guests on foreign aprons, allotted awkward and remote slots at O’Hare or LAX, the odd ones out amid immodestly long rows of United and Delta aircraft, they now took their turn at having the superiority of numbers, lining up in perfect symmetry along the back of Satellite B.
Sibling 747s that had only recently been separated out across the world were here parked wing tip to wing tip, Johannesburg next to Delhi, Sydney next to Phoenix. Repetition lent their fuselage designs a new beauty: the eye could follow a series of identical motifs down a fifteen-strong line of dolphin-like bodies, the resulting aesthetic effect only enhanced by the knowledge that each plane had cost some $250 million, and that what lay before one was therefore a symbol not just of the modern era’s daunting technical intelligence but also of its prodigious and inconceivable wealth.
As every plane took up its position at its assigned gate, a choreographed dance began. A passenger walkway rolled forward and closed its rubber mouth in a hesitant kiss over the front left-hand door. A member of the ground staff tapped at the window, a colleague inside released the airlock and the two airline personnel exchanged the sort of casual greeting one might have expected between office workers returning to adjacent desks after lunch, rather than the encomium