A Week at the Airport (9 page)

7 The British Airways flight crews also maintained offices at the airport. In an operations room in Terminal 5, pilots stopped by throughout the day and into the evening to consult with their managers about what the weather was like over Mongolia, or how much fuel they ought to purchase in Rio. When I saw an opening, I introduced myself to Senior First Officer Mike Norcock, who had been flying for fifteen years and who greeted me with one of those wry, indulgent smiles often bestowed by professionals upon people with a more artistic calling. In his presence, I felt like a child unsure of his father’s affections. I realised that meeting pilots was doomed to escalate into an ever more humiliating experience for me, as the older I got, the more obvious it became that I would never be able to acquire the virtues that I so admired in them – their steadfastness, courage, decisiveness, logic and relevance – and must instead forever remain a hesitant and inadequate creature who would almost certainly start weeping if asked to land a 777 amid foggy ground conditions in Newfoundland.

Norcock had come to the operations room to pick up some route maps. He was off to India in his jumbo but first wanted to double-check the weather over Iran’s northern border. He knew so much that his passengers did not. He understood, for example, that the sky, which we laypeople so casually and naively tend to appraise in terms of its colour and cloud formations, was in fact criss-crossed by coded flight lanes, intersections, junctions and beacon signals. On this day, he was especially concerned with VAN115.2, both a small orange dot on the flight charts and a wooden shed two metres high and five across, situated on the edge of a farmer’s field at the top of a gorge in a thinly inhabited part of eastern Turkey – a location where Norcock would in a few hours be taking a left fork on to airway R659, as his passengers anxiously anticipated their lunch, a lasagne being prepared even now in Gate Gourmet’s factory. I looked at his steady, well-sculpted hands and thought of how far he had come since childhood.

I knew, at least in theory, that Norcock could not always, in every circumstance, be a model of authoritative and patriarchal behaviour. He, too, must be capable of petulance, of vanity, of acting foolishly, of making casually cruel remarks to his spouse or
neglecting to understand his children. There are no directional charts for daily life. But at the same time, I was reluctant to either accept or exploit the implications of this knowledge. I wanted to believe in the capacity of certain professions to enable us to escape the ordinary run of our frailties and to accede, if only for a moment, to a more impressive sort of existence than most of us will ever know.

8 From the outset, my employer had suggested that I might wish to conduct a brief interview with one of the most powerful men in the terminal: the head of British Airways, Willie Walsh. It was a daunting prospect, as Walsh was having a busy time of it. His company was losing an average of
£
1.6 million a day, a total of
£
148 million over the previous three months. His pilots and cabin crew were planning strikes. Studies showed that his baggage handlers misappropriated more luggage than their counterparts at any other European airline. The government wanted to tax his fuel. Environmental activists had been chaining themselves to his fences. He had infuriated those in the upper echelons at Boeing by telling them that he would not be able to keep up with the prepayment schedule he had committed to for the new 787 aircraft he had ordered. His efforts to merge
his airline with Qantas and Iberia had stalled. He had done away with the free chocolates handed round after every meal in business class, and in the process provoked a three-day furore in the British press.

Journalism has long been enamoured of the idea of the interview, beneath which lies a fantasy about access: a remote figure, beyond the reach of the ordinary public and otherwise occupied with running the world, opens up and reveals his innermost self to a correspondent. With admission set at the price of a newspaper, the audience is invited to forget their station in life and accompany the interviewer into the palace or the executive suite. The guards lay down their weapons, the secretaries wave the visitors through. Now we are in the inner sanctum. While waiting, we have a look around. We learn that the president likes to keep a bowl of peppermints on his desk, or that the leading actress has been reading Dickens.

But the tantalising promise of shared secrets is rarely fulfilled as we might wish, for it is almost never in the interests of a prominent figure to become intimate with a member of the press. He has better people on to whom to unburden himself. He does not need a new friend. He is not going to disclose his plots for vengeance or his fears about his professional future. For the celebrity, the interview is thus generally reduced to an exercise in saying as little as possible without confounding the self-love of the journalist on the sofa, who might become dangerous if rendered too starkly aware of the futility of his mission. In a bid to appease the underlying demand for closeness, the subject may let it drop that he is about to go on holiday to Florida, or that his daughter is learning how to play tennis.

There was evidently nothing of standard consequence that I could ask Mr Walsh. There was no point in my bringing up pensions, carbon emissions, premium yields or even the much-missed chocolates – no point, really, in our meeting at all, had not events reached the stage where articulating this insight would have seemed rude.

So we got together for forty minutes in a conference room, between Mr Walsh’s meeting with a trade-union representative and a delegation from Airbus. I felt as if I were interrupting a discussion of beachheads between Roosevelt and Churchill in May 1943.

Fortunately, I had come to the conclusion that though Mr Walsh was the CEO of one of the world’s largest airlines, it would be wholly unfair of me to treat him like a businessman.
The fiscal state of his company was simply too precarious, and too woefully inaccurate a reflection of his talents and interests, to permit me to confuse Mr Walsh with his balance sheet.

Considered collectively, as a cohesive industry, civil aviation had never in its history shown a profit. Just as significantly, neither had book publishing. In this sense, then, the CEO and I, despite our apparent differences, were in much the same sort of business, each one needing to justify itself in the eyes of humanity not so much by its bottom line as by its ability to stir the soul. It seemed as unfair to evaluate an airline according to its profit-and-loss statement as to judge a poet by her royalty statements. The stock market could never put an accurate price on the thousands of moments of beauty and interest that occurred around the world every day under an airline’s banner: it could not describe the sight of Nova Scotia from the air, it had no room in its optics for the camaraderie enjoyed by employees in the Hong Kong ticket office, it had no means of quantifying the adrenalin-thrill of take-off.

The logic of my argument was not lost on Mr Walsh, who had himself once been a pilot. As we talked, he expressed his admiration for the way planes, vast and complicated machines,
could defy their size and the challenges of the atmosphere to soar into the sky. We remarked on the surprise we both felt on seeing a 747 at a gate, dwarfing luggage carts and mechanics, at the idea that such a leviathan could move – a few metres’ distance, let alone across the Himalayas. We reflected on the pleasure of seeing a 777 take off for New York and, over the Staines reservoir, retract its flaps and wheels, which it would not require again until its descent over the white clapboard houses of Long Beach, some 5,000 kilometres and six hours of sea and cloud away. We exclaimed over the beauty of a crowded airfield, where, through the heat haze of turbofans, the interested observer can make out sequences of planes waiting to begin their journeys, their fins a confusion of colours against the grey horizon, like sails at a regatta. In another life, I decided, the chief executive and I might have become good friends.

We were getting on so well that Mr Walsh – or Willie, as he now urged me to call him – suggested we repair to the lobby downstairs, where we could have a look at a model of the new A380, twelve of which he had ordered from Airbus and which would be joining the British Airways fleet in 2012. Once we were standing before it, Willie, with what seemed a child’s sense
of delight, invited me to join him in climbing up on to a bench to appreciate the sheer scale of the jet’s ailerons and the breadth of its fuselage.

So much warmth did I feel for him as we stood shoulder to shoulder, admiring his model plane, that I was emboldened to mention a fantasy I had harboured since I first received authorisation to write a book about Heathrow. I asked Willie whether, if he had any money left, he might one day consider appointing me his writer-in-flight, in order that I might constantly circumnavigate the earth composing, among other things, sincere dedications to my patron, impressionistic essays describing the ochre colours of the western Australian desert as seen from the flight deck, and vignettes recounting the balletic routines of the stewards in the galley.

There was a pause, and for a moment the bonhomie disappeared from the chief executive’s handsome grey-green eyes. But soon enough it returned. ‘Of course,’ he said, beaming. ‘Once at Aer Lingus, the video system broke down, and we invited a couple of Irish minstrels to sing songs on a flight to New York. Alan, I could see you at the front of the cabin doing a ditty or two for our passengers.’ And following
that prognostication, he apologised for taking up so much of my precious time and called for a security officer to escort me to the door of his corporate headquarters.