Thursday, February 15, 2007

Flying again


The conversation begins as conversations on planes often do. Where you flying to? On holiday? How long? What will you do? What line of work you in? Humdrum stuff. The sort of conversational openings you can predict and answer by lip reading even if you are half deaf from the cabin clatter and engine roar.

Slightly more unusual openings which guarantee I raise an eyebrow and have to react to and think of some non-formulaic response are things like, “There’s dandruff on your shoulder,” or “Good egg, this one, though I prefer mine sunnyside up,” or “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” or “You look like Lord North.”

And then there are the openings people who would be classified as being on the fringes of whatever constitutes “normalcy” use, like, “Why do you think Evelyn wrings her hands so much?” when I have never before met the asker nor the Evelyn referred to; or “Hand over your wallet, pronto,” when I am not called Pronto.

And then there are the ‘Did you knowers...?’” On today’s flight I sat next to such a person.

He is gazing out the window over the wing. People who take the window seat frequently do this. I sometimes wonder if they get sore necks. After a while, he turns to me and says, “Did you know that over the course of a long flight the wings start bending upwards a little higher than they did at the start of the flight because fuel in the wing-tip tanks decreases the weight out at there?”

I didn’t know that and I said so.
So I learned something and we talked about wing technology for quite a while. Apparently the wing looks simple but it’s a crucial part of the plane. And not just for staying attached to the fuselage. There is the shape of the wing which is a secret and which Boeing and Airbus guard as jealously as Coca Cola guards its formula. And then there are moving bits like flaps. And the way the engine is attached to the wing.

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