Parries → Flightblogging 

It’s a misty morning here on the highways of southern England, 6:46am according to the red italicized digital clock at the right-side front of the bus. Two episodes of Star Trek on this here MacBook—“Tomorrow is Yesterday” and the impressive “A Taste of Armageddon”—are enough for one morning. With the squeaks from the front and the clatter from the bulkheads and the smell from the toilet, there’s a reason to prefer Gatwick and the train over Heathrow and the bus. It’s very misty but we’re here. Korean Air Cargo. A parking lot.

It’s been a while since I was at Heathrow. The departure area here at Terminal 3 is impressive, with nice parquet flooring and a variety of coffee places selling at more or less high street prices. Check-in at Virgin was a breeze—almost no line. Is it the time of day? Was I early or late? So far it’s been a smooth airport experience—no sweating, no rushing—though I’m quite exhausted nonetheless due to having slept 3.5 hours only. But I don’t really feel like more coffee. I’d eat something but I don’t know how soon after boarding the plane we’ll be fed. Heathrow does seem to have less eateries with views of the runway than doth Gatwick. Five minutes to boarding.

8:05am. A swarthy Muslim-looking woman wearing a headscarf is manning the airport security desk. I roll my eyes at her, at the irony, the ridiculous political correctness; then at myself, my unfair assumption that she herself is likely to have jihadi and murderous leanings. I shouldn’t do that. Very rude.

Is this mad and overkill and destructive, travelling all this way to work on a web site? At Amdocs the client paid for the team visits.

4:10pm and as good a transatlantic flight as the previous one on Continental was bad. A generous breakfast, the fanciest entertainment setup I’ve seen on a plane, with a wide choice of movies to watch at your whim, rather than rotating through a cycle. But a couple of small complaints. The headphones I got may have come sealed in a plastic bag, but their felt smelled of grimy human hair oils. Saving grace: the headphone jack is standard 3.5mm so I could use my own phones. The yogurt was a bit peculiar, smelling like the coat of one of the older geezers on the bus to the airport. Saving grace: the breakfast came with two yogurts, or rather, a yogurt and a cute muesli package from Ireland with a sealed tub of yogurt to pour onto it when ready to eat. And remarkably enough, the little fruit salad seemed perfectly fresh despite being cut up and served en masse. It couldn’t have been cut more than an hour before I ate it.

I’ve watched two movies here on the plane: Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, which was better than their previous outing (Jessica Alba should have gotten first bill for this one); and The Good Shepherd, better than expected, much more exciting than Matt Damon’s only-slighly-less-asinine-and-empty-than-its-predecessors Bourne Ultimatum. Angelina Jolie playing against type. Restrained performance by Damon works well. Some harsh scenes there, and Pesci with a great cameo, though Damon gets that punchline:

Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something. We Italians, we got our families, and we got the church. The Irish, they have the homeland. Jews, their tradition. Even the niggers, they got their music. What about you people, Mr. Wilson? What do you have?
Edward Wilson: The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.

Nice that even up here in the friendly skies they show this and all the movies unedited—even the scene where our hero has a beautiful woman hurled out an airplane by the pilot and crew!

All these movies though, and sitting in one’s seat with the blinds down to see them, you of course lose the magic of flying. It takes me a period of standing in the bulkhead passage to rediscover that magic. It’s like looking down the center of a train carriage and seeing the panorama of the scene, moving but blocked in the middle with the rest left to the imagination to complete. Standing there at the bulkhead you get something. You see less but you feel more, because golly gosh, we’re participating in the modern miracle of commercial air traffic up here. Plus, we’re up in the sky! It’s a great place to have thoughts.