Rhapsody: Aeroplanes

I went on an aeroplane, recently.

And it’s been so long. Every year, since I was born, my family would jet off on another long-haul flight to the other side of the world; it’s how I spent a two week chunk of my school holidays. We had a chain of doing Texas many years in a row. Before that, several trips up and down the east coast of Australia.

You know exactly what halted my 20 year-long streak.

As a kid, before I learnt that poor people existed, I couldn’t fathom the idea of someone never being on a plane before. It seemed like such a natural thing for everyone to do. To go on all these holidays I had no idea were that expensive. I couldn’t fathom never being out of the country, even. Americans still flummox me with that one.

To dream of flying makes you human, I thought.

I think about people who are terrified of flying. Those who can’t rationalise hundreds of tonnes of metal soaring through the skies. Those who look down to the impossibly small houses below, and can’t comprehend seeing the Earth like gods do. Those who watched one too many documentaries on flight crashes. Those who clutch to their sickbags like it’s a rosary, the only thing grounding their mortal form here.

And I feel genuine sadness, at that.

For me, I’m as excited for the plane ride itself as I am for the holiday.

It’s been three years. I didn’t realise how much I missed it. Manchester Airport heaves with holiday-goers and strains from its covid-ravaged workforce. I’ve been through my share of travel rushes, so this doesn’t phase me, but knowing how to navigate it all doesn’t dampen the constant adrenaline of not wanting to be the one guy holding up a security line of a hundred people. Where’s your boarding ticket? Your passport? Is your covid test valid? Did you get all your electronics out of your bag? Is there something in your pocket you forgot? Is it shoes on or shoes off? Do you need to remove the jacket, too?

Then it all melts away at the familiar sights of luxury brands.

My instincts kick in, as I’m eating tax-free breakfast. I’m on holiday.

I’m going to be on a plane soon.

Boarding is nothing special. Sat at a gate playing on a Switch while waiting for a seat number to be called out. When I was younger, it was my DS. I always found the amount of times your pass needs to be checked funny, as well. Check at security. Check at the gate. Check before you’re on the plane. Check while you’re on the plane.

I will speak now from experience. A backpack under the seat beats a carry-on suitcase. Always.

And seating’s always a palaver, isn’t it? One extended queue, and then you’ve got one guy shoving their bag into the overhead bin and holding up everyone behind him. Then it’s fumbling by that person shoving theirs up and squeezing by this person who’s sat down, all just to sit down in an awkwardly leg-roomless chair.

Does that safety demonstration actually do anything, in the end? Twenty three years of my life and I’ve never needed that lifejacket. It’s the exact same on every single airline. I have it committed to memory. I could jump up and join them.

Then, it doesn’t matter. I’m on a plane.

My pupils dilate.

It’s the unknowns, that get me. The thing about windows on an aeroplane, is how you can barely see the outside. In a car, you have full view of the world. Half of those walls are glass, and should you be so lucky the clouds above you smile down. In a plane, you’re given a circular slice of nature. No more. When you’re in a queue with anywhere between two to twenty planes in front of you, there’s no idea how many away you are from escaping into the clouds.

The mechanical flaps on the wings ripple and flex, like an eagle catching the wind in its feathers. Satisfied, it marches on.

Everytime the engines rumble you aren’t sure if it’s another part to the slow advance, or this is the one where it will make its triumphant assault on the sky. You can try peering out of that window, desperate for any glimpse of your orientation, but to no success. The tarmac here looks the same as the tarmac there. The tarmac there looks the same as the tarmac of the runways. Another rumble, another slow stop. Another rumble, longer this time, another slow stop.

Then, they don’t rumble. They roar to life in an instant and barrel down the runway, the cabin shaking and metal grinding in its wake.

Pilots approach it differently. Some treat it as a delicate operation. To carefully ween the plane off the ground, to remind it of its purpose and the job it must do. So carefully, to not upset those the plane protects. Others treat it like rearing a wild horse. This plane will fly, hurled upwards, regardless of who or what inhabits it. You can feel that jolt when the wheels are no longer touching the ground. The weight liberated from them as the engines take the burden. You can feel it.

Flying sates a deep, deep need in my soul. I didn’t realise how much I needed it. I’m not entirely sure why I need it. But I felt something as the plane took off. Like it was scratching an itch in a place I couldn’t chart on a diagram. Like it was nourishing organs I forgot I had.

And the turbulence as you climb. The brief moments of weightlessness as the pilot banks and pitches through the winds. All the lefts and rights as we discover exactly which direction is our ‘forward’, to plough through unchanged for the next seven hours.

More. I want more. I want the sky to battle and bend us for having the audacity to think we could grace her heights.

I feel those fights, the most. After I’m off this plane and readjusting to life below the clouds. I feel my body trying to compensate for knocks of turbulence that aren’t there, and popping my ear canals on reflex. I feel rushes through my veins preparing my heart to be left suspended in my ribs, just for a few seconds.

This is where I belong. In the infinite, insurmountable sky. Feeling the gentle rumble of meticulous engineering with a thousand hours behind it. Seeing how blue really is such a gorgeous colour. Looking down, hundreds of thousands of people through that little circle, realising how insignificant we all actually are in the end.

I’m at peace, here. I wish I could live in the skies.

Then I remember half the budget that went to this holiday is for everything this part isn’t.

I went to Chicago, recently.

The city was wonderful to me, and makes me want to return. American cities have a specific touch, every road the same; all squares, no curves. I turn left, I should have turned right. I go straight on. I turn left. I turn left. I’m lost. I turn right.

I see one of the most beautiful skylines I’ve seen in my life.

I turn right, I should have turned left. I go straight on. I turn right. I turn right. I’m lost. I turn left.

I see the peak of American architecture a stone’s throw across the river.

Americans are so eager to tell you how it’s so easy to not get lost in their cities. They’re built to be navigable! Here’s a key. A crossword puzzle. Here’s a number system that no other country uses to tell you how to navigate urban planning that only came to be in this single corner of the world.

It doesn’t matter. I will never get used to it. There’s nothing I can do to not look like a fool as I find myself clueless in the masses of these jungles, and the only victory is to embrace it.

One of the many things I’ve learnt to embrace.

I went to Macy’s, recently.

In Chicago. My mother’s taste in fashion has worn off on me, and I found myself on the better end of Captain Vimes’ Boots Theory long before I read Discworld. I was walking around in black Levi jeans, a vintage edwardian-style blouse, a cape and mantle made from real leather; I’ll wear plastic when I’m embalmed and thrown into the dying Pacific.

I get many comments on the outfit. Living in alternative fashion means you start getting used to the attention you recieve, but those unique compliments always stick in your mind. One man on the CTA called me a superhero.

I look like I belong, among the jewellery that’s quintuple my credit card limit.

“Excuse me,” an assistant says, as Americans are so fond of, and I’d been continually reminded of their unique approach to customer service, “what brand are your boots?”

The question stuns me. Never in my life had I had someone care for what was behind the fabrics. They only cared for the looks, no regard to the name and price tag behind them. As they should.

“Russell and Bromley,” I say.

“I’ve never heard of them!” she sings. “They look so good!”

“They’re a UK brand,” I say, to her continued amazement. I smile and thank her for the compliments.

I wander back through the aisles, thinking how lab-grown gems shine just as bright.

I’m on the edge of that world of luxury. The world most will only experience through television series and documentaries. I brush by it almost everyday, to the point most people think I live there. And I know, because of how capitalism works, I will find myself ascending through salaries and back in the throngs of it, just like I was at the age of eight, dutifully following my mother through perfume aisles at the airport.

My socialism is fueled by champagne.

But that world, it only exists on the ground. Where everyone else cares what you look like, and not where they put their boarding pass last. Where makeup isn’t decanted from Italian leather and shoved into plastic bags. Where your high-end purchases aren’t made two feet from someone on a budget airline.

I walked around Chicago in brands. Ones you wouldn’t find imitated on the highstreet, but brands nonetheless. There’s no use pretending they’re something they’re not. On the aeroplane, I wear my old zipped jumper with the fluffy hood to keep the cabin chill off. I wear my reliable jeans I bought five years ago with a hole I stitched over. I wear my trainers so broken-in they would be impossible for anyone else to wear. Only my arch fits that sole.

People fly in suits, of course. There’s always the one. Some business-type with sunken eyes running on a redbull and jetlagged six hours behind. They probably have a meeting scheduled for the moment they run out that cabin door.

But there’s no glamour here. There are no appearances to keep up. That suit holds as much fashion weight as my shirt with a still-unidentified stain does. On the plane itself, they’re jammed into the same seats and given the same rules on when we can and cannot leave them. They eat shitty food and drink that one tub of water covered in tinfoil that’s inexplicably served on every single airline. There’s no glamour here.

We are all at the mercy of the sky. We respect it; we have to.

And yet, the aeroplane itself is the one thing that doesn’t. Man was not given the means to fly. None of us have wings. And trying to circumvent that, to build our way to the heavens, eventually there’s no oxygen.

We made the aeroplane with no need to breathe. It only uses the air to travel, a careful balancing act of physics. How much thought, has gone into that? How many attempts and failures to bring us the dominators of the sky so commonplace today? Have you seen, the tests they put them through? They bend and break these beasts and strain them to their absolute limits, to face one of the most extreme biomes on Earth. The one place we were never meant to conquer.

They try so hard to make aeroplanes something they’re not. The paradigm of luxury and style. Sophisticated. A jetsetter, a professional, rolling up to their velvet-clad seats with a pristine carry-on suitcase and a permanent, white-toothed smile. You see them, on every single advertisement. Served by a dutiful stewardess who wants nothing more than to dedicate herself to their entire existence, no more than an automation. Just like they would be served back on the ground. Or perhaps, they’re served a slice of a life that, to them, is just out of reach, not realising how far that gap truly is. Maybe they, too, get mistaken for being part of it.

But the existence of an aeroplane is one that defies every attempt at aesthetic sanitation. There is no room for the matter of making things look ‘better’. The exterior cannot change like a car can. Consider that, how many cars you’ve seen looking so different from the other. Someone believes this curve is more aerodynamic than that one. This shape is so much easier on the eyes than that one.

An aeroplane cannot afford the silly opinions of man. One wrong concave surface, or a window slightly too big, or a wing too small, renders faults and stress that ruin its integrity. Then soon it will be unfit to fly. They all look so similar by a simple ruling of physics. Every plane is beholden to the sky, as much as it has the audacity to pierce it.

The aeroplane is the perfect evolution of rigourous engineering.

And there is beauty in that. Of course there is beauty in that.

The beauty of the cabin with pressure calculated to the exact needs for life thirty thousand feet from where it should be. The beauty of the engines bursting into speeds scaling hundreds of miles per hour. The beauty of the wings, precision tensile strength and able to weather the worst storms humanity could dream of.

A beauty that is in defiance of the world on the ground.

I’ve experienced the luxury they so desperately wish to sell. Multiple times. When we went to Australia, my parents deemed it reasonable to splash out the extra pounds on legroom and hot towels before takeoff. Business class.

They do so certainly try. This was Singapore Airlines, an airline that prides itself on an image of prestige and luxury for everything that isn’t economy. Legroom is the one often quoted, but what isn’t is how you get waited on. The cabin crew put on a whole performance of being butlers, remembering your drink orders and what snacks you like to eat. Doting on you so carefully that your meals are made exactly how you want them. The seats lean back far enough to turn into beds, with privacy shields from the rest of the world. You could play, to my five year old brain, the best games on the entire planet with that remote I have seen nowhere else but hoisted by a stretchy wire in an airliner chair.

But all around you, even the interior clad in rich colours, is still the omnipresent realisation that you are on a plane. The constant drone of the engines that no sound-cancelling has truly figured out how to silence. The toilets, that have terrified child and adult alike. The odd bits of turbulence that don’t suddenly stop because you walked left instead of right. Physics doesn’t bend around a few more stacks of cash. You speak louder over your closed-back headphones to the person next to you, in bed. You clench your phone to not fall into a suction vortex, while applying skincare. You wear your seatbelt while the cabin trembles through the forces of nature, as you are handed a menu.

It cannot be hidden. It cannot be covered in diamonds and jewels to be sold as something it’s not. Even as they try, the cracks are revealed everytime they ascend. For that plane to be that little slice of luxury they are so desperate for, it would never be able to leave the ground.

They are completely beholden to its antithetical beauty. As the plane is beholden to the sky.

And capitalism has tried — oh, how it has taken what corners of the aeroplane it can! — as it has tried with everything else. All those lies of aeroplane luxury. Of painless flights. Of Egyptian cotton and French wine and Italian chefs. Of the world they’re so used to packaged with a bright pink bow and brought on as cabin luggage, not a single inconvenience to grace them.

And the aeroplane will soldier on by the laws of physics, by the laws of the sky, forever suppressing form over function. Forever exposing how hollow those lies truly are.

And there’s nothing they can do about it.