Journal tags: flight

I was supposed to be in Cork over the weekend.

Not only was it high time I paid my mother a visit, but the Cork Folk Festival was happening too. So I booked some relatively cheap plane tickets for myself and Jessica back in August and noted down the days in my calendar.

We didn’t end up getting our flight. This time it wasn’t because I messed up the flight times. We made it to Gatwick airport in plenty of time. That’s when we saw that our flight was delayed.

See, Storm Amy was moving in. We were hoping to get into Cork before the storm hit, but now with the flight delayed, that wasn’t likely. In fact, it was more likely that the flight would just get more and more delayed and possibly even get diverted.

To start with, we settled in at the airport, prepared to spend an hour or two more than we had planned. But, sure enough, the delays kept piling up. It was time to make decision; wait it out in the hopes that we’d eventually make a very bumpy landing in Cork, or cut our losses and run.

I quickly looked up flights for the next couple of weekends and spotted some cheap ones a fortnight away. I booked them and then called my mother to tell her we wouldn’t be showing up that night, but we’d see her in a couple of weeks.

Alright then, time to go home.

Wait a minute …how exactly are we supposed to leave the airport other than on an airplane?

It turns out there’s a process called “decontrolling”. You need to find someone from the airline (or in our case, a third-party contractor operating on the airline’s behalf) who has the security privileges to walk you back out. But you still need to go through passport control …even though you never left the building.

Luckily we didn’t have any checked luggage or it would’ve gotten complicated. As it was, it was just weird. It was all very City And The City.

That flight we abandoned did finally take off …six hours late. By that time we were back home on the sofa eating pizza and listening to the wind gusting outside. I think we made the right choice.

The latest issue of Spaceflight—the magazine of the British Interplanetary Society—dropped through my door, adding to my weekend reading list. This issue contains a “whatever happened to” article about the military personnel who were supposed to crew the never-realised MOL project.

Before Salyut, Skylab, Mir, or the ISS, the Manned Orbital Laboratory was the first proposed space station. It would use a Gemini capsule and a Titan propellant tank.

But this wasn’t to be a scientific endeavour. The plan was to use the MOL as a crewed spy satellite—human eyes in the sky watching the enemy below.

The MOL was cancelled (because uncrewed satellites were getting better at that sort of thing), so that particular orbital panopticon never came to pass.

I remember when I first heard of the MOL and I was looking it up on Wikipedia, that this little nugget of information stood out to me:

The MOL was planned to use a helium-oxygen atmosphere.

That’s right: instead of air (21% oxygen, 79% nitrogen), the spies in the sky would be breathing heliox (21% oxygen, 79% helium). Considering the effect that helium has on the human voice, I can only imagine that the grave nature of the mission would have been somewhat compromised.

Today was a Salter Cane practice day. It was a good one. We tried throwing some old songs at our new drummer, Emily. They stuck surprisingly well. Anomie, Long Gone, John Hope …they all sounded pretty damn good. To be honest, Emily was probably playing them better than the rest of us.

It was an energetic band practice so by the time I got home, I was really tired. I kicked back and relaxed with the latest copy of Spaceflight magazine from the British Interplanetary Society.

Then I went outside and watched the International Space Station fly over my house.

I measure transatlantic flights in movies watched. Yesterday’s journey from London to Seattle was four movies long.

1. The Imitation Game: a necessarily fictionalised account of Turing’s life (one of the gotchas about top-secret work is that it’s, well, secret). But couldn’t Tommy Flowers have been given at least a walk-on part?
2. Fury: Brad Pitt plays Lee Marvin in a war story told through the eyes of the naive rookie as seen in The Big Red One and Saving Private Ryan.
3. Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Part One: The Hungering.
4. Paddington: just right for the end of a flight.

I’m back home after a bit of a whirlwind visit to the US for An Event Apart in Atlanta (which was, as always, superb). I’m currently battling east-west jet lag. My usual technique is exactly what Charles Stross describes:

Simply put: go to bed immediately but set an alarm to wake you after no more than 3 hours. Then get up, and stay up, until 11pm. That’s around 3-5 hours. During this time, do nothing more intellectually challenging than running a hot bath. You haven’t caught up with your sleep deficit, you’ve just pushed it back a bit: you are as cognitively impaired as if you are medium-drunk. Now is a good time — if you have the energy — to load your dirty clothes into the washing machine, have a bath, watch something mindless on TV, and catch up on web comics. Don’t worry: you won’t remember anything tomorrow. Just refrain from answering urgent business email, driving, assembling delicate instruments, or discussing important matters — if you do any of these things, odds are high that you’ll get them horribly wrong due to the impairment caused by cumulative sleep deprivation.

He goes on to wish for the invention of teleportation (and to describe a jet-lag inspired RPG).

There’s another situation where we have to deal with sitting in one place through a long uncomfortable experience: dental surgery. In that situation, we rely on medication to get us through. A little bit of nitrous oxide and the whole thing is literally over before you know it.

Why don’t we do the same thing for transatlantic air travel? The equipment is already in place—those oxygen masks above every chair could easily be repurposed to pump out laughing gas.

If this is a stupid idea, you’ll have to forgive me: I blame the jet lag.