This is an aside titled 'Dan Hill reviews A Week at the Airport, by Alain de Botton' dated 10/30/09
Dan Hill reviews Alain de Botton’s book about his residency at Heathrow Airport: “A central theme is the (accurate, I think) impression that few industries are as “vulnerable to disaster” as commercial aviation, but that this leads essentially to a kind of pervasive frustration running through much of the experience. Here, the business simply cannot win. It is perpetually teetering on the the edge of delivering failure. All that changes is the scale of ‘disaster’. The fact that you’ve been delivered safely to and from 25000 feet is conveniently ignored by passengers in favour of being miffed by the size of the taxi queue, or by being infuriated by a mildly officious attendant at the check-in desk, or sitting for hours on the runway due to pre-departure engine failure at Bangkok, or by one’s luggage flying to Belgrade while you fly to Buenos Aires. Focusing on these smaller ‘disasters’ is perhaps a way of dealing with the extreme nature of the experience of flying, and the everyday aversion of real disaster by these incredible systems of technology and people. The whole act is too surreal to think too deeply about – so people don’t, generally rejecting thoughts about how precariously they’re travelling by distracting themselves with the more mundane and everyday breakdowns in a system that’s far too complex to run smoothly.” (via.)-
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