Destination: the airborne metropolis — experience take-off in the world’s largest jet

By Dallas Campbell, Presenter

Right now, there are around a million people flying above your head.

It’s easy to feel removed from the flying experience, dwarfed as we are by the industry’s scale and complexity.

The ‘city in the sky’ is a bewilderingly complex network of interconnected systems: of engineering, algorithms & architecture. And, like cities on the ground, it’s in a state of constant change.

Aircraft have evolved in response to new economic & environmental demands.

The supersonic futuristic travel of my youth has evaporated, overtaken at the speed of light by that other planet-shrinking technology called the Internet.

My father was a British Airways Captain, so my memories are punctuated with cherished behind-the-scenes vignettes on a more human scale:-

Captain Campbell in the cockpit

• The spectacular landing on Barra beach in the Outer Hebrides;
• West Berlin in the jump-seat of a BAC Super One-Eleven;
• Hitch-hiking on Concorde from JFK on a standby staff ticket;
• The approach to Hong Kong: Captain Campbell, cool as a cucumber, banks hard right – the ‘checkerboard turn’ – avoiding the mountains, threading it through the Kowloon skyscrapers before gently placing the plane down on the old Kai Tak runway.

Those days of jump-seat flying are sadly gone.

The cockpit doors now permanently locked, isolating the public even more from the experience.

But for me flying still evokes personal memories; a very different kind of human geography.