When Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was first asked to fly the mail from Alicante to Casablanca, he asked another pilot, Guillaumet, to talk him through the terrain in advance. This was 1926 and aviation was a somewhat magical business. “Guillaumet didn’t teach me about Spain,” Saint-Exupéry later wrote, “he made Spain my friend. He didn’t talk about hydrography, or population figures, or livestock. Instead, when talking about Guadix, he spoke of three orange trees at the edge of a field.”
The world looks very different from the air. Different priorities and different readings emerge. Three orange trees can take on supreme importance. “Little by little,” Saint-Exupéry concludes, “the Spain on my map became a fairytale landscape.”
Saint-Exupéry went on to write an actual fairytale, of course, and The Little Prince is a book in which the thrum of early aviation is always present, a constant warm purring at the threshold of hearing. But in Wind, Sand and Stars, the memoir in which he describes his work on the mail route, he goes on to suggest that, in the decades since those early rattling adventures, something has been lost. Wind, Sand and Stars was written only 13 years after his Spanish gig, and yet: “Today…the pilot, the engineer and the radio operator aren’t embarking on an adventure…but shutting themselves in a laboratory. They respond to instrument needles, not the unfolding of a landscape.”
I re-read this passage recently and thought: that’s lovely writing, and I love the clipped, aristocratic certainty of it, but is he correct? Flight may have moved beyond the days that Saint-Exupéry is so brilliant at describing, when a navigator would often stick his head out of the window when flying – I forget what they would be checking; I’m sure they had their reasons – but flight is still a thing of fairytales and wonder. Something strange happens to us when we’re up there in the clouds. Seatback movies make us more emotional. The landscape below exerts a sweetly mechancolic strain of hypnotic power. Flying transports us across the world but it also shifts us inwards: consciousness seems to retreat into a special secret compartment in the warm, snoozing depths of our minds, a place of duvets and pillows and surprisingly chunky thoughts. We all become lyrical. We all become poets.
MS Flight Sim 2020 – London City to Lewisham Watch on YouTube
If you want to see proof of this, the release of Flight Sim is a perfect example. Flight Sim is probably the greatest act of corporate poetry in recent years, all of this released by a company, Microsoft, that is not known for its twilight musings and widow’s walks. (I suppose TS Eliot was a banker.) Even so, people load it up and are transformed. They are unable to adequately describe what it’s like up there above the clouds, but they want to try anyway. Their eyes take on a subtle glaze. Maybe a slight welling. I’ve seen it again and again. (Also, they go and look for their own street.)