h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sat outside yesterday around 3.30pm.

**

Light is dying; just over a month until the shortest day.
Must be the warmest November I ever remember.

Clear deep blue sky. Birds are flying too and fro, seagulls, crows, pigeons. Why are they all flying in that plane?


But the planes are flying in other planes.

The ones coming into Heathrow, pretty low. They have that strange effortless, slow movement..slight banking. Heavy and big. And you can clearly see all the colours of their wings and tails, and the sun reflecting on them, as they fly towards it.

Very very high above are the ones coming up from Gatwick. And they all have vapour trails. The tiny planes like a pin point of creativity, piercing the blue. Their following vapour trails precise...but then start to fluff out and curl..then fall apart and disappear in little wisps.

It touches me to think of those those people far above me. And where are they going?

While you're looking at those soaring planes, do you ever think just how amazing it is that 300 tons of steel and alluminium actually not only stays up there but actually gets off the ground in the first place?

I once read somwhere (wish I could remember where!) that the force required to lift a jumbo jet is equivalent to one person per square centimetre sucking through a drinking straw

I always wonder where those people are going too.

Yes, and why?

Where I live we have a similar layering of flights. There are the small ones flying quite low into the Downtown airport (soon to be closed, finally); the ones flying to the International south of town; and then the various layers of higher ones leaving con trails in all sorts of directions. We get lots of flights over us flying from Europe to the Western U.S. and from Japan to Toronto or New York. My neighbours latest novel is partially set farther north where the only planes that land are small ones. Her characters describe the con trails as 'skyscrapes' and wonder similar things about the people in those little specks.

The week or so after 9/11 had the most wonderfully clear blue uninterupted skies.

Yes, why, and why am I not on a plane going someplace interesting?

Also I remember being really creeped out by the first planes I saw after 9/11.

My favourite thing was when that Icelandic volcano went off on one..and all planes were cancelled. I felt so lonely.