The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [79]
Out on the airfield, the damage was greater than I had imagined. While a few of the planes were still whole, most had already been so extensively gutted and filleted for spare parts that only their rib cages were left intact. The ground was strewn with undercarriages and engines, seats and cargo boxes, ailerons and elevators. Machines which had spent the better part of their working lives being cosseted by engineers and highly trained mechanics had in death been hacked at with chain saws and diggers.
It was surprisingly noisy too. Food-trolley doors, seat belts and upended toilet seats clacked in the wind, making the place sound like a marina in a storm. Many of the planes wore liveries testifying to corporate hubris: Midway, Braniff, Novair, African Air Express, TWA, Swissair. Most had started out in the fleets of well-funded flag carriers and then over time had slipped down the rungs of the aviation ladder until, in their final employment, they were reduced to doing midnight cargo runs from Miami to San Juan and back or shuttling between Addis Ababa and Harare, their once-immaculate first-class seats patched up with silver duct tape.
One Somali Airlines 707 was lying on its side, with only one wing still attached. Qantas had bought the machine in 1966 and flown it between London and Sydney for eight years before selling it to Malaysian Airlines. In Kuala Lumpur, the new owners had exchanged the kangaroo painted on its tail for a stylised bird and removed the first-class compartment. After completing a decade’s worth of trips to Hong Kong, the plane – by now badly stained around the rear of its fuselage – had been passed on to the Somalis. Limping aloft with the help of unauthorised spare parts, the Boeing had ferried soldiers, smugglers, aid workers and tourists between Mogadishu, Johannesburg and Frankfurt. Then had come an accident with a van at Mogadishu airport, a bullet wound in the tail during a battle with insurgents and an emergency landing in Nairobi with one of the engines on fire. After the airline went broke and its CEO was shot dead in a bungled robbery, an agreement was reached to ship the frail machine to its last resting place.
It was striking to see how quickly the planes had aged: though the oldest of these examples had not yet been off the production line for half a century, they seemed more antique than a Greek temple. Inside the cabins were remnants of now-obsolete technologies: outsize Bakelite phones, coils of fat electric cables, bulky boxes on the ceilings where film projectors had once been slotted. The cockpits had seats for flight engineers, whose jobs were presently being done by computers the size of hardcover books. Some aircraft still sported their Pratt & Whitney JT3D engines, the proud workhorses of the 1970s, which had generated a then-remarkable 17,500 pounds of thrust, little guessing that a few decades later their successors would, with a fraction of the fuel or noise output, be capable of producing five times that.
What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less