Flight!

                                                 Benoy

To fill the quiet moments in my exciting life I have been watching Heathrow Airport Live on YouTube. With a bright setting sun, dawdling on its way down, brightening the area and enhancing the view, I sit while various aircraft head up yonder.  Large ones, small propellor driven ones, and double deck bus sized aircraft are brought into view.  All the time someone is leaving or arriving, a very busy scene.

I am once again amazed that a 'Turkish Airlines' plane weighing hundreds of tons, and carrying over 200 passengers with luggage, can leave the ground and fly for a couple of thousand miles with no problem.  Sometimes we take for granted the amazing world we have.  The fact that I can sit here, a hundred and so many miles away and watch this happening is another wonder.  Another wonder we take for granted.

There are so many wonders around us, so many we take for granted.

However, I wonder why aircraft and photography, computers and medical science, were not 'discovered,' and put into production thousands of years ago?

Ah you say, we did not know the science, the chemicals, etc, so many discoveries came later.  But why did they come later?  Early man built huge Henges, Pyramids, Temples.  Greeks developed the Antikythera Mechanism about a hundred years BC, why did they not go further, the brain power was there?  Strange that so many things were discovered only in the last 300 years or so.

I watch as a double deck 'British Airways' aircraft lumbers along the runway.  He appears to be doing no more than 50 mph, yet keeps coming.  Slowly, so slowly, this lumbering creature runs along the runway that I begin to imagine him not getting off the ground.  Suddenly the nose rises sharply, and the beast takes ungracefully to the air.  It still appears to me to be doing no more than 50 mph as it reaches a thousand feet are turns away.  At such speeds he will take an age to reach the USA or China, but reach it he will.

People will murmer about pollution, while driving their cars, yet little is done about it anywhere.  Cars cause more pollution, there is more of them, and some nations, like India and China, still rely on coal fired power.  A few aircraft cannot be any worse.  

Heathrow is now concentrating on watching a Boeing 777 of 'Korean Airlines' take to the sky. This is no passenger flight, this is a bundle of parcels making their way back and forth across the world.  More needless glittering items that someone 'must have,' yet will have forgotten by the end of the year.

A bit like me I suppose...