The Miracle of Flight

Flying over Samburu, Kenya

Britt has a lovely story from one of the many dozens of flights he has taken for work trips. It goes like this:

Walking across the Tarmac to the plane in Abuja, Nigeria, a 4-year old boy with his hand in his father's squeals with joy. He hops and skips, and says, "We are going on an AIRPLANE! THERE IT IS!"
With his family, he sits five rows ahead of us. We hear him say, "Look at the wings!"
He squeals again on takeoff and says, "We are flying IN THE AIR!"

The story is a joyful reminder of the innocent directness of children – and of the everyday miracle of human flight.

I have a facebook friend who punctuates the updates on her frequent travels with a “Pouf! I’m in [new destination].”  It’s such a lovely way to acknowledge how magically we are transported from one part of the world to another thanks to airline routes, e-tickets, and frequent flyer miles.

For the Christmas holidays, Britt and I joined up with our sons in Europe –  a sort of halfway point for a family split between East Africa and opposite sides of the United States. For the journey, Britt and I began our day in Nairobi, had happy hour along the canals of Amsterdam, and woke the next morning to clear blue skies over Marseille.

Happy hour in Amsterdam, en route from Nairobi to Marseille

With all the current security measures and limitations on what and how much you can carry onto an airplane, air travel has lost some of the fun or cachet it once had. We get frustrated with queues and questions, become annoyed at being squashed into tightly packed seats, and tire of feeling dehydrated and even somewhat dehumanized.

And yet.

What a wondrous thing it is to be able to fly through the air, above the contours and obstacles of land and sea. How glorious to cover distances in hours that used to take days or even months.

In the days before air travel, journeying from Europe to Africa involved endless legs of trains and ships and rough roads. Even during the early days of aviation, though the pace was picked up, the obstacles and travails were still considerable.

In her beautiful book, West with the Night, the Kenya-born and raised aviation pioneer, Beryl Markham, describes flying her plane back and forth from Nairobi to London in the 1930s. With stops to refuel and hassles over transit permits through various countries along the way, the journey often required something like 10 days. She had to deal with considerable discomforts and overnight in some pretty colorful places, including a Libyan brothel, for lack of other accommodations.

It puts having to sleep in the airport hotel or lounge into perspective, certainly.

Flying also gives us a measure of the vastness and beauty of the earth’s features – the deserts and mountains and blue seas, the dense jungles and city lights, the tidy patchworks of crops and fields. Going north from Nairobi across the African continent to Europe, you get a real sense of the huge expansiveness of the Sahara desert. You see the Nile River, the entire outlines of Sardinia and Corsica, and large swaths of the Alps. The evidence of human activity and habitation is visible, though you can only capture the big picture and not the minutia. Individual people and concerns disappear to be replaced by a greater whole, made of all the interconnected bits of our lives.

Beryl Markham describes her reaction to her first airplane ride this way: “I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup.”

Her contemporary, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, who survived a crash in the desert of North Africa and died when his plane was shot over the Mediterranean in WWII, said that flying released his mind from the tyranny of petty things.

Today, we easily let the petty annoyances of modern air travel overshadow the immensity of the accomplishment of human flight. We quickly lose sight of the perspectives and possibilities it offers us. And it can take the simple reactions of a small child to remind us of its magic.

“We are flying IN THE AIR!”

The miracle of flight