Friday, November 07, 2003
Last Flight of the Fast Plane
To hell with greatness, it’s fleeting and evanascent and all in the eye of the beholder. Coolness is the thing really worth brushing up against, and now I’ve done it, just before the week was out and it would have been too late. Eddie runs building services for us, he’s got a broad smile, a great attitude, he’s built like a dodge Apache pickup and he takes care of people with attentiveness and humor. When I ran into him downstairs I learned that he’s also an aircraft mechanic, and that he’s always harbored a dream to fly on the Concorde. And, on the final supersonic commerical flight from New York to Heathrow, he made his wish come true. For three hours he sat in the second row of the fastest common carrier ever, and when the plane landed it was retired - never to be flown commercially again. Too expensive to fly; too expensive to maintain… the time of the Concorde was over. Eddie was the last to leave the cabin, photographing the exit door on his way out. When he landed he was in merrie olde englande, where you boot in your trunk and the horses are ox-drawn. It took a lot longer for his return flight, but that jaunt is already faded in his memory. Those quick three hours at 60,000 feet and 1,800 miles per hour - those remain fresh when he relives the dream he brought to life. When he told me about it, his eyes gazed heavenward and his smile flicked at his earlobes. “Yeah,” he kept repeating, reliving every detail of the trip in his retelling of the story to me. “Yeah.”
Damn straight, Eddie. Way to be great. Thanks for paying such close attention, and sharing the trip with me today.
