Read Online A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton - Free Book Online

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 whole operation guided by an awareness that, while the craft could under most circumstances be extraordinarily forgiving, a chain of events originating in the failure of something as small as a single valve could nevertheless bring it down, just as a career might be ruined by one incautious remark, or a person die because of a clot less than a millimetre across.
    I toured the exterior of the aircraft on a gangway that ran around its midriff and let my hands linger on its nose cone, which had only a few hours earlier carved a path through dense layers of static cumulus clouds.

    Studying the plane’s tapered tail, and the marks left across the back of its fuselage by the enraged thrust of its four RB211 engines, I wondered if scientists and engineers might have designed planes and their means of take-off differently had our species been graced with some subtler, less thunderous mode of conception, perhaps one managed frictionlessly and quietly by the male’s sitting for a few hours on an egg left behind in a leafy recess by the female.
    10 At around eleven-fifteen each night, by government decree, the airport was closed to both incoming and outgoing traffic. Across the aprons, all was suddenly as quiet as it must have been a hundred years ago, when there was nothing here but sheep meadows and apple farms. I met up with a man called Terry, whose job it was to tour the runways in the early hours looking out for stray bits of metal. We drove out to a spot at the end of the southern runway, 27L to pilots, which Terry termed the most expensive piece of real estate in Europe. It was here, at forty-second intervals throughout the day, on a patch of tarmac only a few metres square and black with rubber left by tyres, that the aircraft of the world made their first contact with the British Isles. This was the exact set of coordinates that planes anticipated from across southern England: even in the thickest fog, their automatic landing systems could pick up the glide-path beam that was projected up into the sky from this point, the radio wave calling them to place their wheels squarely in the centre of a zone highlighted by a double line of parallel white lights.
    But just now, the patch of runway that was almost solely responsible for destroying the peace and quiet of some ten million people was becalmed. One could walk unhurriedly acrossit and even give in to the temptation to sit cross-legged on its centreline, a gesture that partook of some of the sublime thrill of touching a disconnected high-voltage electricity cable, running one’s fingers along the teeth of an anaesthetised shark or having a wash in a fallen dictator’s marble bathroom.

    A field mouse scurried out of the grass and on to the runway, where for a moment it stood still, transfixed by the jeep’s headlamps. It was of a kind which regularly populates children’s books, where mice are always clever and good-natured creatures who live in small houses with red-and-white-checked curtains, in sharp contrast to the boorish humans, who are clumsily oversized and unaware of their own limits.