Taking Flight (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

A January Friday. Cold, grey, bleak. A day for buttered malt loaf and window staring.

It’s a typical garden scene. Grass, borders, fences, shed. Bird feeders, primed. My eye is caught by a quiver in the hazel. Quiver becomes rustle, rustle becomes blue tit, hopping up to an outer branch, checking for danger. Alert, always alert. It flies up to the feeder, flicks its tail, turns, pecks, turns again, pecks again. Another flick, back to the perch, check for danger, and off it flies, over the fence and away. Whizz, whirr, flurry. Ten seconds later and I would have missed it.

It’s an everyday occurrence, repeated hundreds, thousands, millions of times daily. Blue tit’s gonna blue tit, and I’ll always watch. They’re active birds, constantly on the move. Agile, acrobatic, endearing – all three at once when they’re hanging upside down from a bird feeder. But from this brief encounter one thing stands out.

It flies.

It. Flies.

It’s a thing so normal, so entirely taken for granted, that we forget how extraordinary it is. Our planet has gravity strong enough to draw objects of mass towards its centre – to defy that in pursuit of an aerial life seems needlessly perverse. It’s a notoriously difficult thing to do.

The trick, as Douglas Adams so neatly put it, is to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

Humans are terrible at it. We manage the first bit well enough, but it’s the missing that causes problems. Gravity’s a bugger that way. But this hasn’t stopped us trying. Human history is littered with the bodies of those whose ambition to fly has been brought crashing down to earth – literally and metaphorically – by harsh reality. For centuries the best we could hope for was a kind of mitigated plummet.

But while our bodies are ill suited to staying up in the air, our brains are good at problem-solving. A comparatively short time after our emergence as a species we came to understand that the ways of the air, while complex and invisible, are quantifiable, and that we might be able to exploit them to our advantage. And, crucially, we got good enough at technology to make machines that could help us realise our dreams.

And so we managed to haul our stubbornly unaerodynamic bodies into the air, and – and this is the important bit – keep them there. We’ve been doing it for well over a hundred years now, and we’re pretty good at it. With the help of technology, we can swoop, glide, hover, dive, climb, soar, float, drift and – if so inclined – slip the surly bonds of Earth and touch the face of God.* We can fly high and low, fast and slow, round the world and back again. Thanks to flying machines, our world has changed.

But still an inconvenient truth remains: without artificial aids we are drawn by the laws of physics back to the ground. Even though we have used our oversized brains to devise ways round this fundamental inadequacy, put us in a flying race against a mosquito or a beetle or even that reluctant last-resort flyer the red-legged partridge, and there will only ever be one winner. When it comes to telling the story of flight in the animal kingdom, we must – sorry, Icarus – allow others to take centre stage.

While many species, for various reasons, remain earthbound, plenty of others happily spend between 1 and 99 per cent of their time in the invisible medium we call ‘the air’. Unknowns being what they are, it’s difficult to deal with exact numbers, but of the more than 1.5 million described animal species on this planet, the vast majority have the gift of flight.

I suspect we don’t think about this enough. What would happen if we spent more time looking up, drinking in the spectacle of an animal defying gravity, and thinking about how this came to be, what it means, and what a wondrous thing it is to fly? At the very least, it would divert us for a few seconds. And we might imagine ourselves in their place, might strive to abandon for once our narrow, limited view of the world, see it from a different perspective. An exercise in empathy, an attempt to find within ourselves the capacity to be, however temporarily, something else.

The ability to fly seems miraculous to those not endowed with it, but a miracle is something that breaks the laws of nature – while flight is indeed awe-inspiring and envy-inducing, it sticks to the rules. The principle is in fact remarkably simple: four forces – lift, thrust, weight and drag* – combine, to the advantage of the aspiring flyer. Produce enough lift and thrust to counteract the weight and drag, and off you go. But the more you explore the subject, the more complex and involved it all gets, and the more accurate that word ‘miracle’ seems.

None of this worries a flying animal in the least. A pied wagtail, bouncing merrily over my head on West Norwood High Street with a cheery chizzick!, isn’t thinking of wing loading or aspect ratios or any of the other concepts that govern its capacity for merry bouncing. It just does it, in the same way that I, when catching a cricket ball, am not doing differential calculus to work out the ball’s trajectory. I merely catch it.†

The pied wagtail’s insouciance is replicated manyfold in its avian peers. From the ridiculous agility of a hummingbird to the powerful grace of an eagle, the freedom that flight represents is most readily observable in birds. Of the planet’s other flyers, insects are small, bats fly at night, and pterosaurs are extinct – but birds are right there, flaunting their ability for all to see.

There are many reasons to love birds – their featheriness, their behaviour, the fact that they’re dinosaurs. But at the heart of it is flight. As a child, I loved birds without understanding why; as an adult, I realised that flight played a large role in my obsession. This was in direct opposition to my own relationship with being in the air. For a long time flying fell into the same category as rugby: I was a keen observer, but an extremely unwilling participant. While it gave me pleasure to watch a great tit flitting from tree to feeder or swallows hawking midges from the surface of the local pond, my own forays into the air were fraught with nerves. It took me many years to embrace flying as an acceptable form of travel. Only gradually did I understand my own fear, realising that it wasn’t flying that scared me. On the contrary, I was captivated by the feeling of being suspended high in the air, seeing the world laid out in miniature below me. It brought a sense of freedom that transcended the inconvenience and discomfort associated with being trapped in a thin metal tube. I wanted little more than to dispense with the material of the aeroplane and engage completely with the flyingness. It wasn’t being in the air per se that gave me the heebie-jeebies. No, what I was afraid of was the idea of transitioning precipitously from flying to not flying.

In other words, I was terrified of crashing. And I didn’t anticipate the pre-crash plummet too keenly either.

Over time I learned to take a more rational approach to this phobia, and in doing so I began to think about flight in all its manifestations, and to delve into what it means to flyers and non-flyers alike. Once you start thinking about the extraordinariness of flight, it’s difficult to stop. Difficult, too, to quell the urge to grab passersby, point at the carrion crow rowing gamely through the air, and yell, ‘Look! Look! It’s flying!’

Curiosity piqued by the wonders of avian flight, I was soon asking questions about all the other flyers. How do hoverflies hover? Why are bats the only flying mammals? What does a daddy-longlegs actually achieve with its frankly pathetic, gangling excuse for flight? How and why and when did all this airborne nonsense come about in the first place?

This last question, the question of ‘when’, necessarily involves some delving into the issue of ‘geological time’, a subject apparently designed to induce giddiness. Perhaps this is because true understanding would demand we acknowledge how utterly tiny we are, and I don’t think humans are very good at that. The idea of ten years is manageable – we can remember what we were doing ten years ago and can at least have a stab at predicting what we might be doing in ten years’ time. A hundred years, while more than most people’s lifetimes, is still touchable – a matter of a few generations. A thousand is conceivable – think William the Conqueror and so forth – but requires some imagination. Ten thousand is familiar as a number because it’s how long agriculture’s been around, but try to touch it and we find ourselves groping in the dark. And as for a hundred thousand years – nope. A million? That’s one hundred spans of agriculture; three and a bit times longer than Homo sapiens has been around; or, if you find it easier, ten nopes.

And yet a million years, in geological time, is relatively small beer. Take the lifespan of this planet. If I were to represent this time frame – four and a half billion years, give or take – using a scale of a million years per page, this book would be 4,550 pages long. The first 500 pages, it has to be admitted, would lack interest for the student of life,* although the true enthusiast might gain a certain amount of pleasure from contemplating the texture of the empty pages. But gradually marks would appear, each one representing a...