Holidays in Heck Read online

  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.”

  I, however, couldn’t find any controls except rudder pedals to pump. I hope these weren’t computer-linked to anything and that I didn’t initiate wild yaw that knocked any Iron Bird engineers off their ramps and ladders. In front of me, instead of a yoke, was a foldout desktop. Perhaps these days the most important function of a pilot is to fill out Homeland Security forms with information on suspicious passengers.

  “Look over to your left,” Peter said.

  “But it’s like the joystick on an Atari game,” I said.

  “Yep,” Peter said.

  “Could you fly one of these?” I asked. “I mean, and land it?”

  “Yep,” Peter said. “The computers do all the work.”

  And there were a lot of computers—eight LCD screens. They showed . . . Well, they showed lots of things.

  “I’ve never played Atari,” I said.

  Debra explained that the A380 has essentially the same computer hardware and, indeed, essentially the same cockpit as all Airbus aircraft, from the 107-seat A318 on up.

  “So you just build a plane,” I said, “and the cockpit plugs in like a memory stick.”

  “I don’t think we put it that way in the promotional literature,” Debra said.

  The promotional literature cites the advantages of “Flight Operational Commonality.” Airbus estimates that pilots of its A340 series aircraft, which carry 300 to 380 passengers, can be certified to fly the A380 with just a week or two of additional training, thanks to the adaptive flexibility of computer technology.

  I’ve never been fond of computers the way I’m fond of the stuff that I call hardware. Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There’s more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it’s awfully close to human.

  “Does spam ever pop up on the cockpit computer screens?” I asked. “Or random celebrity sex videos?”

  “No,” said Debra.

  Debra took us to the A380 interior mock-up, to see how the humans that we’ll be awfully close to will be seated on the A380. Toulouse, of course, is where Lautrec was from—he of perfect proportions for modern airline seating. But I didn’t mention it. Debra did mention that Airbus has no final responsibility for what airlines do with the A380’s interior, let alone for the behavior of the passengers. But Airbus tries to keep air steerage from being foisted on the public. And the designers of the A380 interior mock-up tried to wrest the graciously spacious from the ghastly vast.

  Clever partitioning eliminated the tube-of-doom look and gave the rows of seats theater-like proportions. In theaters, after all, people regularly sit more tightly confined in harder chairs for worse ordeals than an airline flight. At least that was my experience with Rent. In the forward cabin wide steps rose to the upper deck, and in the tail a spiral staircase descended. For some reason a spiral staircase always adds zest to a setting. Perhaps it speaks to the DNA helix in us all.

  Airbus wasn’t trying to kid anyone with this mock-up. No bowling alleys, squash courts, or lap pools were to be seen. Instead there were a small duty-free shop, a couple of miniature barrooms where you could stand with your foot on the rail, a nook with built-in davenports, and other places in which you could stretch, be free and easy, and not feel you were trapped in a Broadway extravaganza and would catch hell from your wife and the eighteen people between you and the aisle if you bolted.

  The first-class section, naturally, was supplied with those investment bankers’ La-Z-Boys—Laissez-Faire-Boys, if you will—that can turn themselves into club chairs, chaise longues, or featherbeds and are equipped with buttons to press to get practically anything you want other than that celebrity in the sex video. Business class had something similar, with maybe one fewer caviar spoon and champagne bucket per customer.

  But most of us travel as “gate freight.” The A380’s size is what seems to worry people, yet the size is also the selling point—offering potential comfort as well as potential low fares. The A380, although it contains 50 percent more room than a 747, is supposed to contain only 35 percent more seats. The A380’s upper passenger deck is almost as wide as the main deck of a 747, and the lower one is 19 inches wider. Airbus says proudly—a little too proudly—that 1.3 inches in seat width is gained in economy class. This is modest progress. The 747 was introduced in 1970. I’ve gained 1.3 inches in seat width since the last time I bought pants.

  Once you’ve girdled yourself into a seat, a better measure of comfort than width is what’s termed pitch. This is the distance between my expanding posterior and the aching back of the person in front of me. Airbus wants seats to have a minimum of 34 inches and urges airlines to choose the thinnest seat-back designs. But pitch space is lost to that Satan’s looking glass, the in-seat video screen.

  A 32-inch pitch, or even less, is common in the airline industry. I am five feet nine. Sitting in a living room chair I measure 26 inches from my wallet to the disappearance of my trouser creases. Add 4 inches for the TV-thickened seat in front of me, and stuff a 3-inch copy of the Michelin Guide into my seat-back pocket, and a 32-inch pitch means arthroscopy surgery.

  In the economy section of the A380 mock-up, Airbus designers compensated for this dark truth with relentlessly cheerful carpet and upholstery in subtropical-fruit colors. I think they ov
erdid it. One shade of citron pleaded to be called “Lemony Snicket.” The mock-up also had a mood-lighting system that projected upon the cabin ceiling a beautiful morning, noon, or nighttime sky, according to the hour of the day. This would be perfectly unnecessary if the fool in the window seat would quit watching Wedding Crashers, open his shade, and look outside.

  I looked outside myself, and a real A380 was standing on a taxiway. The Airbus corporate complex sprawls like an American Sunbelt development, but with the Toulouse airport at the center of it instead of a golf course. The A380 was a 3-wood and a 5-iron away. It didn’t look so large. Then I noticed, next to the A380, a wide-body A340, the largest Airbus plane until now. The A340 was diminutive in its ordinary hugeness. Even so, the A380 was more impressive for its presence than for its bulk. The wingspan is 261 feet 8 inches—53 feet longer than an A340-600’s. But there is a reassuring double amount of surface to the A380’s wing. This wing is so thick where it meets the fuselage that you could park a car inside. The A380 cockpit, instead of being perched on the catbird seat like a 747’s, is placed low in the fuselage, where the pilots can mind their business with the ground. It gave the plane a high-foreheaded, thoughtful look.

  The A380 in fact has not two but three decks—the lowest devoted to luggage, freight, and crew rest facilities for long-range flights. The decks are contained in an oval cross section with a smooth, sailing ship curve. The wings sweep back at thirty-three degrees, almost into the shape of a jib, and the stabilizer fin is as wide and tall and rakishly set as a Cunard funnel. The A380 seemed nautical—more liner than airliner. No one ever quailed at the prospect of the Queen Mary 2’s carrying 720 passengers.

  “Five hundred and fifty-five,” Debra corrected.

  The A380—the only one flying at that time—taxied away, then turned and rolled in our direction. Now it did look like an airplane, carrying itself with dignity and tending a bit to embonpoint. It had none of the fashionable emaciation of the old 707, with its gaunt runway-model (as it were) looks. Nor did it have the DC-10’s scary putthe-engines-anywhere accessorizing style. Rather, the A380 had ton. (And tonnage.)

  “Can I get on a test ride?” I asked.

  “No,” Debra said.

  “Why?”

  “Insurance,” Peter said.

  Insurance is not usually a romantic word, but think of death and all the other romantic things there are to be insured against. Maybe aviation hasn’t lost its glamour. The A380 rose decisively, and before I thought it would. A 747 needs a third of a mile more to take off. The A380 flew over our heads with a Brobdingnagian whisper. It makes half a 747’s noise. And then the A380 flew away, into a haze very similar to the haze projected on the windshield of the A380 cockpit simulator. Let the haze stand for predictions about the future of travel. Will it ever be fun again?

  Anyway, building an A380 seemed like fun. Debra and Peter and I went to the production line. Surprise at the scale of the A380 was quieted by surprise at the scale of the place where three more of them were being built. I did not know there was so much indoors. The factory, Debra said, can be seen from space.

  Actually, the A380 is built all over Europe. This was the final-assembly plant. The plane arrives in seven pieces sounding like some provincial soup recipe: three slices of fuselage, two wings, a fin, and a tail. The parts come to Toulouse by way of ocean freighters, canal barges, road convoys, and Airbus’s whale-shaped and more than whale-sized Beluga transport plane. (Measured by cargo volume, the Beluga is even larger than the A380.) I particularly liked picturing whole wings and great cabin sections strapped to humble barges, bringing a bit of industrial reality (and swamped decks) to people taking those French canal-boat tours and trying to pretend that travel is fun.

  The constituent parts of an A380 are placed in a single enormous jig—a Jell-O mold with the miniature marshmallows, fruit slices, and nutmeats aligned by means of laser technology to degrees of precision that take a lot of zeros behind a variety of decimal points to express.

  Engineering miracles have always required genius, but the miraculousness has gotten to a point where comparable genius is needed to explain it. Fortunately, a genius showed us around the factory. This was Charles Champion, an Airbus executive vice president and the head of the A380 program since the project was launched, nearly five years before. Champion has since been promoted to chief operating officer of Airbus. (And, after this was written, demoted again, for slowness in bringing the A380 to fruition.) But he is, first, an engineer. And he all but glowed with enjoyment of the A380’s engineering. For example, the A380’s wings are clad in an esoteric alloy, what an ordinary mechanical engineer would call “unobtainium.” The wing panels are up to 180 feet long and 9 feet wide, and in places they are only inch thick. They need to hold a “double curved aerodynamic shape.” The way to achieve this is with a twenty-four-hour application of varying temperatures and loads to create “stress relaxation” and “permanent deformation.” The process is called “creep age forming” and, opportunities for Michael Jackson wise-cracks aside, I have no idea what I’m talking about.

  But Charles Champion did. And he made everything, if not exactly clear, clearly exciting.

  Peter was looking around as if he were on a machinery Mount Olympus, watching the powers of the firmament come together, this Leda mating with (aided by laser technology) that swan. Peter is a romantic about machines. When he was a helicopter pilot, machines saved his life any number of times. Of course it was machines that put his life in jeopardy. But that’s romance.

  Charles Champion told us how the first A380 built wasn’t flown but was towed to a static test platform, where its wings and fuselage were twisted and bent and loaded with weights until the plane was destroyed.

  “That must have been horrible,” I said “to see that happen to your first A380.”

  “Engineers love to break things,” Champion said.

  And French industrial workers love to make them. At least they seemed to at Airbus. The assembly plant had a calm, cheerful, collegial air. Everything was tidy and well lit. Only the most muffled noises of manufacture could be heard. If Charles Dickens had visited Airbus he might have given up on the frenzied life of writing and lecturing that eventually killed him and reconsidered the blacking factory.

  It had been a day of reconsideration for me, too. I was reconsidering my free-trade principles. The governments of France, Germany, Britain, and other European Union countries have “invested” in the A380. Boeing calls this a subsidy and has gone off in a snit to the World Trade Organization—as if Boeing didn’t sell Air Force One to the U.S. government for a pretty penny. Should I be upset that taxes on Europeans will help pay for American airfares?

  I was reconsidering my free-market ideals, as well. Charles Champion said that among the difficulties of the A380 program were the political considerations of which factories were to make what where. The result, it seems to me, is that the most expensive parts, such as the wings and cockpit, are manufactured in the most expensive places, such as England and France. A Chinese electronics company might as well outsource production to Manhattan. But do we really want Guatemalan child laborers sewing the treads to the tires on our landing gear?

  And I was reconsidering the French. They were welcoming at Airbus and everywhere else in Toulouse. They didn’t make fun of Peter when he spoke their language or me when I spoke mine. Food was magnifique. Manners were charmant.

  At a magnifique lunch given in the Airbus executive dining room by the elegant Barbara Kracht, the vice president of media relations, manners had remained charmant even when I’d asked her, “What’s with the bus?”

  “You could have called the company,” I’d said, “‘Airphaeton,’ ‘Airlimosine,’ even ‘Airyacht.’” She had responded politely, saying that when Airbus was founded, in 1970, it was still difficult to get people to think of flying as an ordinary means of transportation. We’ve gotten over that little hurdle.

  One thing I wasn’t reconsidering was
air travel. I had a flight home the next day and was trying not to think about it—with some success, considering that I was standing next to a device to provide the most air travel in history. We were on a platform beside a nearly completed A380. The wingtip was just above our heads. “Go ahead,” Charles Champion said to me. “Grab it.” I reached up and tentatively curled my fingers over the metal. “Now pull down,” he said.

  The A380 wing is one of the mightiest structures ever created—9,100 square feet of ribs, spars, and skin able to thrust itself out 147 feet into nothingness and give lift to its half of 1,235,000 pounds. I pulled, and this great formation bowed to my eye level, supple as a living thing.

  With the whole wing flexing at my light grasp, all the poetic, fanciful wonder of living in the twenty-first century came back to me. I’d outdone Keats and Shelley in matters of the sublime. It touched them. I touched it.

  I was full of quixotic fervor. I would fly on an A380 straight to hell. And, unless airport amenities, immigration clearance, baggage delivery, customs inspection, and the courtesy of security personnel improve dramatically before the A380 goes into service, I will.

  7

  IF YOU THINK MODERN LIFE IS AWFUL, YOU HAVEN’T SEEN MODERN ART

  Venice Biennale, July 2005

  How bad does modern art stink? Every two years since 1895 (war and such allowing) the Venice Biennale has gathered new masterpieces from around the world in a place and at a season where the reek of genius can be accurately compared to the warm-weather aroma of the Grand Canal. Dr. Johnson defined art as “the power of doing something which is not taught by nature.” What’s in the canal is something nature teaches us to do from our first hours of infancy. It is as nothing to the power of art.

  Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the crockery that his wife had thrown at him for painting broken pieces of crockery instead of painting the bathroom and hall. Or maybe you lost interest back when Andy Warhol silk-screened canned lunch for the kiddies and oddments from under the kitchen sink. There’s been so much to be so uninterested in. And yet, astonishingly, modern art has gotten less interesting. I didn’t know this. I was more prepared to be irked than bored. The Biennale consists of national pavilions, mostly from Europe or Europe-aping countries. One or more brilliant creative types are selected to fly the flag. Given how Europeans feel about America, I doubted many of the flags flown would be the Stars and Stripes. There are also two curated shows, the largest in the Arsenale, the former Pentagon of Venice. The city-state projected its great military and commercial might from the Arsenale, which now sits empty between art shows, nicely symbolizing progress of the arts, other than the arty ones, in Europe today: arts of manufacture, diplomacy, and war.