Flying back from Dubai to London today. Seven hours all in daylight, which must be quite unusual in the northern hemisphere at this time of year. Great for someone like me who needs to look out of the window every so often -- today at the Burj Khalifa, Mesopotamia, the Anatolian highlands dusted with snow, the distant Alps (spectacularly close on the way out) and the Rhine.
A lady captain today; that's a first on a long haul flight for me. Like all BA flight crew, she sounded cool and authoritative (are you listening, Dad? Mine's a treble). Along with glancing outside at the Rolls Royce logo on the engine, that's very comforting - but perhaps I'm being irrationally patriotic.
I wonder if anyone else notices the same (apparent) effects as me when flying. I think that I think particularly clearly, attested to by finishing the Times and Telegraph crosswords, which I've fallen out of the habit of attempting, very quickly. I suppose it could be that there are fewer distractions. I'm also very productive working. That's usually on the way out, so that could be all to do with needing a report or presentation ready by the time I get there. The third thing is that I always think wine tastes better. Maybe one gets pleasantly intoxicated quicker which creates a better impression (like beer-goggles on the ground!) or maybe BA just choose good wines.
Listened to music courtesy of my iPhone and Bose headset after the meal. Picked geographically: Mozart (Prague Symphony) overhead Salzburg, Wagner (various) over Bavaria and Schumann (Rhenish Symphony) over the Rhine, of course. Incidentally, the latter is absolutely one of my favourite works by a lesser-played composer.
I also read the paper cover-to-cover, which is something else I hardly do with the internet being my primary source of news. I actually read a lot of interesting articles that I wouldn't normally; which may form the subject of another post in due course.
Plane arrived 25 minutes early - and the captain had absolutely no trouble parking!
[…runs and hides]
I actually like working on planes. It is more productive, because of the lack of distractions, but it's also a different kind of thinking time - perhaps because we grew up at the dawn of the jet age there's still some excitement/romance around long distance flights that our kids don't have anymore.
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