Technical difficulties

I read once that certain German nursing homes have fake bus stops.  Evidently the patients on the dementia ward find comfort in the act of sitting on a bench under a little shelter and waiting for the bus, even if the bus is nonexistent and will never show up.  We followed an analogous ritual this morning when we all got on the plane that was to take us to Athens, only to get off it again around an hour later due to some kind of technical glitch that the engineering crew couldn’t sort out.  The pilot sheepishly informed us in Swiss-accented English that he “couldn’t accept the aircraft,” a phrasing which (perhaps by intent) gave me some comfort that he was looking out for us.  As if someone had offered him a Bombardier C Series 100/300 and, after giving it a once-over, he shook his head and said that it would not do.

So we lingered by our original gate for another half hour or so, until they told us that we would be taking a different airplane from another gate.  We redeemed the 5CHF voucher they gave us for some sandwiches.

I think it’s good for one’s soul to run into an issue like this every now and again.  It reminds you just how complicated and miraculous it is that we can get from one side of the planet to another in a matter of hours, and that always expecting this process to go perfectly smoothly (or, even worse, making plans with that expectation) is an unreasonable, if not immoral, thing to do.

Conquest of the Skies

Anyone seeking some divine awesomeness while on a long-haul flight could do much worse than spending a few hours in front of a David Attenborough documentary.

“Conquest of the Skies,” playing last night on LX52 (ZRH-BOS), was, I imagine, selected by whoever curates Swiss Air’s in-flight video collection for obvious contextual reasons.  And, I also imagine, with no small sense of corporate pride: as the painted lady butterfly (vanessa cardui) and peregrine (falco peregrinus) have conquered the skies, so have we at Swiss International Air Lines, a member of the Lufthansa Group.  I myself was not feeling quite so smug, casting several nervous glances out the window to confirm that the plane's wings were indeed proper airfoils, like those of the griffon vultures of Segovia (gyps fulvus).

One wonders if, 300 million years from now, similar films will be made by our cockroach ancestors’ version of David Attenborough, examining the fossilized remains of an Airbus 330-300, and speculating about the parasites it must have carried to and from their various colonies.