mid air

It’s 10.30am Spanish time. Ten hours since we left Barajas airport, Madrid. It’s also 9.30m UK time. Which is 5.30am Uruguayan time.

I watched Villeneuve’s disconcerting film, Prisoners. After that I lay down and slept for a while. The plane is no more than a third full, unusually. It gives me room to stretch out.

In doing so, I became acutely aware of the absurdity of my position. Which is also the inherent absurdity of airline flight. The realisation, somewhat banal, came about because of my unusual posture. It’s rare that you get to stretch out and lie horizontally on a Transatlantic flight. I suddenly found myself imagining all that lay below me. 11600 metres of solid air. I am not normally a nervous flier, but the sensation of all that air pressing up towards me, holding me in suspension, made me queasy.

Luckily I slept. For maybe two hours. When I woke up I looked at the map, which shows the image of a white paper plane, as it glides around the globe. The last time I’d looked, before falling asleep, we had been close to the Azores. Pinpricks with Hispanic names in the middle of the Atlantic. Two hours later, the map still registered us as being mid-ocean. It seemed as though we had made little progress. I kept my eye on the screen, then fell asleep for a while longer. When I woke up I watched a 50 minute documentary about the Tuareg.

When the documentary finished I switched the map back on. We did not appear to have moved any further. We were still mid-ocean. Befuddled, I tried to make sense of the figures which flashed up on the screen at regular intervals. They informed that we were seven hours from destination. I didn’t know if it was my sleep-filled head or the jumble of time zones but the figures didn’t seem to add up. No one else seemed at all conscious of the fact the screen had to be wrong. It was the middle of the night. People slept. There was silence. Just the hum of the engines.

The week before a plane had gone missing. It had vanished without trace. People looked for it from the Indian Ocean to the Australian coast but it had disappeared. I couldn’t help but think about it. I thought that this is how it might have occurred. Without anyone realising what was happening. The hours drift by and no-one says anything. Time works differently in the air. We are free form its bonds. Until, all of a sudden too much timeless time had passed. The passengers realised, late in the day, late in the night, that the secure system in which they had placed their faith, had failed them.

I walked down the aisle. I wanted to know if anyone else was concerned. They were all sleeping. I put my head in the stewardess’s section and asked for a glass of water. I asked if she knew what time we were due to arrive. I said that the screens didn’t seem to be working. She said something about seven. Something I didn’t understand. She said: the screen’s been saying seven hours for ages. It was a relief to know she knew. Then I wondered if she too was in on the conspiracy.

People began to wake up as sunlight peeked through the windows. I watched them as they registered the information on the screens and tried to make sense of it. No-one seemed concerned. Just confused. The old couple were baffled, but then they were baffled by everything. Two Italian women who were going to give a concert in the Zitarossa sang them a song as they woke up.

That was half an hour ago, just as I started to write. The display still insists that we are seven hours from our destination, located somewhere above the Atlantic. The plane keeps chugging on. It could be hours before we have any idea if we are on the right track or the wrong one. Our destiny is out of our hands.