As I tap away at this little screen I'm 30,000 feet up in the air and travelling at over 600 miles an hour in what I imagine is several hundred tonnes of metal, plastic and people. I fly a fair bit and the more I do, the more I begin to think that it's a really stupid thing to do!
I mean, I know the physics of the whole thing works - clearly it does or we'd be driving across Denmark right now - and I even have a vague understanding of how the physics works. The science, for me, is not the problem.
No, the problem for me - and it seems to be a bigger problem, the older I get - is with the amount of trust that flying asks me to put in hundreds of anonymous people and systems. It's not just our pilot; he spoke to us earlier and seems like a decent bloke. It's the ground crew and the engineers and the air traffic controllers and other pilots and the security staff and all of the processes and systems and checks thy have been put in place precisely because people make mistakes! I should stop thinking about this.
It's not that I'm a particularly nervous flyer or anything - I don't need sedating and, truth be told, I quite like some aspects of flying. For instance, we've just had dinner and I quite like the neat little arrangement of the food; I think it appeals to a little OCD inside me. But there are other things about flying which are not so great: I guess you could group most of those things under the heading "other people."
All this, of course, applies to economy class. With one exception, a flight home from New York, many years ago, that's the only way I fly so it's all I know. Things may be different in first class or business class - I rather suspect they are.
As I type this, it's 11pm on Sunday, London time and 6am Monday, Hong Kong time. Quite what time it actually is on this plane, goodness only knows but it gives me a headache to think about it, so I'll give up trying to work it out.
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