The Levelling Effect Of Flight
One thing you have to say about flying is that unless we're talking about megastars or heads of state who have their own planes, generally speaking, everyone ends up on the same planes, even if in different parts of the cabin.
For celeb-spotting, airports and aeroplanes are fertile ground. I've sat next to some very well-known people in my time, and at the moment (writing aloft for posting aground) I'm sitting across the cabin from a famous film director who has spent a large part of the flight writing copious notes on a yellow legal pad and then using sticky tape to attach the torn off pages and parts of pages together into longer sheets.
It's just a small insight into a way of working, but interesting for all that.
Sucker!
I am, I cannot deny, a sucker for an iconic image. I'm not talking about the classics I'm afraid - Marilyn Monroe over that grating is a great image, but not my subject today.
Back in the day, British Airways used to use a shot in its promotional material taken from one end of the long side of Heathrow Terminal 4. It was outside, and was of the tail fins of ten or so BA jets each on one of the gates, with just one last one sliding onto stand to complete the set. Sucker for impressive marketing images that I am, it used to get me right *here* (indicates chest).
That was in the days when Terminal 4 was almost exclusively BA's domain of course - the KLM planes were tucked away round the back out of sight. These days the terminal is used by so many airlines it's hard to imagine ever catching such a perfect image in passing.
But one of the advantages of the way US-based airlines adopt certain airports as their hubs is that you can see it over here.
Like this morning, approaching Newark Airport at the crack of dawn, my cab drove past a line up of six or seven Continental planes, and just for a split second I got the tail fins shot.
And the sucker in me rose up and put a rather pathetic lump in my throat.