Holidays in Heck (9 page)

I was getting bored. I could go hiking in the mountains, except it was ninety-five degrees. I could take a refreshing dip, except the ocean was ninety-five degrees. Guadeloupe's painters and artisans are almost bad enough to get into the Venice Biennale. There was nothing in the stores but European stuff at European prices, and, anyway, the stores were, in European fashion, closed most of the time. I began to get American thoughts about Jet Skis, water park slides, and vast air-conditioned malls. Guadeloupe is lovely. But there isn't much to do except eat. Every third building seems to be a restaurant. I chose one of the most prepossessing establishments. The Big Mac was delicious.

For some reason (and judging by the EU Constitution, it was an elaborate one) the referendum in Guadeloupe was held a day before the referendum in mainland France. I went to a polling place at a reinforced concrete school where “
Joyeux Noël
” decorations still hung in the corridor, and interviewed . . . somebody. She seemed to be in charge of something. I said, “
Parlez-vous
English?”

She said, “
Non
.”

Actually, I claim that there's a tremendous journalistic advantage to covering politics when you can't speak the language. You aren't misled into reporting what people say; you're forced to report the inexorable truth of what people do.

The people of Guadeloupe weren't doing much. They certainly weren't voting. I counted ten voters in the
Joyeux Noël
school and none at the next two polling places I visited. The streets of Pointe-à-Pitre were crowded. The stores were open for a change, but the crowds seemed to be standing
around more than shopping. Of course maybe they were standing in line. Guadeloupe provides a very European level of service.

The next day, back in Europe itself, France rejected the EU Constitution because (CNN International informed me) the French were worried about competition from eastern Europeans for French jobs. According to French unemployment figures, the French don't have jobs. In Guadeloupe they're more self-confident about doing nothing. The
département
voted “Oui” in the referendum, albeit with a do-nothing 22 percent turnout.

At the airport, leaving Guadeloupe, I talked to a mainland Frenchman, Antoine. We were standing in line. A reggae band was on our flight. The band had drums. Detailed consideration of the weight and measurements of the drum set had brought seat selection and baggage checking to a halt. Antoine went to buy a bottle of rum and came back twenty minutes later. “This island!” he said. “The airport is full of people and every duty-free shop is closed.” Our line hadn't budged. “I have a business friend who lives here,” Antoine said. “He was in a line like this at the post office in Pointe-à-Pitre. No one advanced in the line for more than an hour. At last he went to the front of the line and said to the postal clerk, ‘Nobody is moving here!' She said, ‘Oh, no?' and put up a sign that said ‘Out to lunch,' and left.”

The French are well advised to worry about competition. But not from the Czechs and Poles. Some citizens of their own country are better at being European than they are.

Toulouse, June 2005

S
ometimes it seems that the aim of modernity is to flush the romance out of life. The library, with its Daedalian labyrinth, mysterious hush, and faintly ominous aroma of knowledge, has been replaced by the computer's cheap glow, pesky chirp, and data spillage. Who born since 1960 has any notion of the Near East's exotic charms? Whence the Rubáiyát? Wither Scheherazade? The Thief of Baghdad is jailed, eating Doritos in his underwear while he awaits hanging. As for romance itself . . . “Had we but world enough, and pills,/For erectile dysfunction's ills.” And nothing is more modern than air travel.

As a stimulating adventure, flying nowadays ranks somewhere between appearing in traffic court and going to
Blockbuster with the DVD of
Shrek 2
that my toddler inserted in the toaster. Thus the April 27, 2005, maiden flight of the Airbus A380, the world's largest airliner, did not spark the world's imagination. Or it did—with mental images of a boarding process like going from Manhattan to the Hamptons on a summer Friday, except by foot with carry-on baggage. This to get a seat more uncomfortable than an aluminum beach chair.

What a poor, dull response to a miracle of engineering! The A380 is a Lourdes apparition at the departure ramp. Consider just two of its marvels: Its take-off weight is 1,235,000 pounds. And it takes off. The A380 is the heaviest airplane ever flown, 171 tons heavier than the previous record holder, the somewhat less miraculously engineered Russian Antonov An-124.

A million-and-a-quarter-plus pounds is roughly the heft of 275 full-size SUVs. And, at approximately 90.5 miles per gallon per passenger, the A380 gets much better mileage than my Chevrolet Suburban unless I have a lot of people crammed together in the rear seats (as the A380 doubtless will).

The A380 can fly as fast as a Boeing 747-400 and farther, and the twin passenger decks running the full length of the its fuselage give it half again more cabin space. However, the only expressions of awe about the A380 that I've heard have been awful predictions of the crowd inside. These tend to be somewhat exaggerated. “Oh, my God. Southwest to Tampa with a thousand people!” said a member of my immediate family who often shepherds kids to Grandma's on budget carriers while their dad has to take an earlier flight “for business reasons.”

Airbus maintains that with its recommended seating configuration the A380 will hold 555 passengers, versus
about 412 in a 747-400. The U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate, the president, the vice president, the cabinet, two swing-voting Supreme Court justices, and Rush Limbaugh can all fly together in an A380. (And maybe
that
statistic will create some popular excitement, if they fly far enough away.) But the London
Sunday Times
has reported that Emirates, an airline with forty-five of the new planes on order, “would pack as many as 649 passengers into the A380.” The president of Emirates, Tim Clark, told
The Times,
“Personally, I'd have liked to put 720 seats in.” And the chairman of Atlantic Virgin Airways, Sir Richard Branson, has bragged that each Virgin A380 will have a beauty parlor, a gym, double beds, and a casino—three out of four of which sound worse than 719 seatmates.

The headline of
The Times
piece—“New Airbus, Same Old Crush?”—captured the tone of the, to use the mot juste, pedestrian A380 media coverage. Reporters devoted themselves to city sewer commission–style articles considering which tarmacs at what airports could accommodate the A380 and how much gate modifications would cost. Would hub-to-hub markets grow, favoring Europe's Airbus consortium with its A380 capacity maximization? Or was the profit center of the future in destination-to-destination thinking, making the American Boeing corporation's smaller but farther-flying 787 Dreamliner the wise investment choice? As if I were going to buy one of these things.

Airbus itself, in its own promotional literature, did not help. A 302-page corporate publication—“Airbus A380: A New Dimension in Air Travel”—contained such drably titled articles as “Airports Need to Optimise”; “A Vision of the 21st Century” (subtitled “The Future: Forget Speed, Enjoy the Arm-rests”); and “Airlines Need to Find a New Way,” which began:

Aviation has lost its glamour. On the one hand, progress is now measured by sophisticated ratios that make it abstract and no longer the subject of dreams. On the other, air transport has become a commodity. . . . Everything has conspired to kill public enthusiasm for new commercial aircraft.

I consulted an old friend, Peter Flynn, who is the sales director for Airbus North America. He assured me that the A380 is an incredible airplane. It didn't sound like mere professional assurance. Peter was a U.S. Navy helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War and remembers when flying was a stimulating adventure, and then some.

Two months to the day after the A380 first became airborne Peter and I were at Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, France, in the A380 systems-testing facility. The outside of the building is as blank as a supertanker hull and about as big. Inside we stood on a glassed-fronted balcony three stories above the main floor looking at something called the “Iron Bird.” This is a full-scale installation of all the mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic connections within an A380 and of all the moving parts to which they are joined except the engines. The Iron Bird was very busy trying out the levers, gears, cylinders, struts, and things-I-don't-know-the-names-of that work the landing gear, rudder, elevators, ailerons, and things-I-don't-know-the-names-of-either.

We think of a passenger plane as a pod, a capsule wafting through the atmosphere containing mainly us and, if we're lucky, our luggage. Jet power plants are simply automatic typhoons, effortlessly blowing hot air. And, while we fervently hope the jets continue to do that, it doesn't occur to us that an airliner has a greater confusion of innards than anything we dissected in science class, even if we went to med school.
I wonder what the ancient Romans would have divined from such entrails. Certainly not aviation. The Iron Bird couldn't have looked less avian. Nor—airplanes being made of aluminum and carbon fiber composites and such—was much ferrous metal involved. The iron in the Iron Bird was in the steel ramps and ladders branching over and through it so that engineers could go to and fro.

Our corporate tour guide, the cheerful and patient Debra Batson, manager for “scientific media,” pointed out the Iron Bird's most important components. These looked to me like a tangle of extension cords from an overambitious attempt at outdoor Christmas lighting. Airbus was the first producer of commercial aircraft to make its planes all fly-by-wire. That is, there are no rods or cables—nothing that can be pushed or yanked—between the flier and the flown. Everything is accomplished by computer command. And I trust that the nosewheel pays more attention to its e-mail than I do to mine.

Debra pointed out the second most important components, which looked like a tangle of garden hoses from an attempt to put out the fire caused by the outdoor Christmas lighting. These were the hydraulic systems that operate the A380's control surfaces. In the A380 the pressure in the hydraulic system has been increased from the usual 3,000 pounds per square inch to 5,000 psi, making the system smaller, lighter, and as powerful as the kick to the back of my passenger seat from the child sitting behind me. The hydraulics also handle the braking on the A380's twenty-wheel main landing gear. “A New Dimension in Air Travel” informed me that “the brake is capable of stopping 45 double-decker buses traveling at 200 mph, simultaneously, in under 25 seconds.” It is an ambition of mine to learn enough math to figure out comparisons like that and write them myself. But
I'm afraid I'd get carried away with digressions about what kind of engine you'd have to put in a double-decker bus to make it go that fast, where you'd drive it, how you'd find forty-four people to drive the other buses, and what would happen to the bus riders. At the moment, in the systems-testing facility, I was carried way with digressions about the miracle of engineering. It is not vouchsafed even to the Pope to see the very mechanism by which miracles are performed. Would the Pope be as confused by his kind of miracle as I was by the Iron Bird? Would this affect the doctrine of papal infallibility?

“Above my pay grade,” Peter said. He and Debra and I went to the other side of the building to look at the cockpit simulators. These were arrayed along a wall and curtained off like private viewing booths for the kind of movie that isn't shown on airplanes. We peeked inside one booth. That kind of movie wasn't playing on the simulator's windscreen. A speeding runway came toward us, followed by dropping land, and enveloping haze, and more vertigo than we would have felt if the floor had moved. It hadn't. “Unfortunately,” Peter said, “the rock-and-roll simulator was booked up today. You can crash that one. And it makes really embarrassing noises.”

The simulator we were in was computer-linked to the Iron Bird. Two pilots in sport clothes sat at the controls while people with clipboards stood behind them taking notes. The pilots didn't seem to do much. Mostly they tapped on computer keyboards or fiddled with a trackball mouse. This was what was causing the frenetic activity in the Iron Bird—a teenager's immersion in Grand Theft Auto leading to an actual car's being stolen somewhere.

I sat in the pilot seat of another simulator. Peter took the copilot position. There wasn't even a jump seat for Debra.
“This whole big, damn thing,” I said, “is flown by . . . you and me?”

“Yep,” Peter said, “and it doesn't need me.”