Basia Unleashed

There is nothing quite like being at 40,000 feet, where time seems to stand still, where the world is pure and bright and beautiful. Unless it’s a night flight and all you can see is the void. Which reminds me of the days when a girl could ask to visit the cockpit and be allowed without being considered a threat. Today I am not even allowed to bring eyebrow tweezers on board in case I kick in the flight deck door and give the captain a much-needed brow job.

So I suppose I should explain why I was in the cockpit in the first place. It all started with a certain Capitan Teresano, an Argentinian airforce pilot, who allowed me into the cockpit of his Fokker as we flew from Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia to Ushuaia, the most southerly inhabited town in the southern hemisphere. For those who don’t know, the Argentinian airforce used to sell seats to civilians as they shuttled around southern Patagonia, maybe keeping their eyes on the Malvinas as they did so. Anyway, this flight deck thrillsville was a revelation to me. Because the planes don’t fly to great heights like jets, the topographical views are mesmerising. I saw the tip of Chile and Argentina as it turns up at its most southerly point back towards the Atlantic, I saw the gentle blue curve of the Earth itself - and I saw the ground rise up to meet us as the Captain landed the plane with me standing upright jammed between him and the navigator. I was addicted.

The night flight from Rio de Janeiro to Amsterdam was, however, something that made me a small child once more. The pilots were after chitchat about Ireland, I was after seeing some stars. The cockpit of a 747-400 series is the size of an average room in an average house. There were three extremely tall Dutchmen, an equally long limbed stewardess and me, with plenty of room between us to set up a dining table and get the drinks out. The pilot duly switched off his cockpit lights so that some random wee Irish girl could sit on the floor and press her face to the window like a child, staring at stars the size of Chinese lanterns for a good 25 minutes. Hundreds of thousands of glowing gleaming dazzling pieces of cosmic light. The sight of them burned a hole in my conscious.

I could have stayed there forever but he wanted his dinner. When I got up to go, still mesmerised, I asked him why they flew with the cabin lights on, thus rendering everything into a gaping void before them, he just laughed and asked why he needed to see where he was going.

“Oh it’s not that,” I said, “it’s what you might not see coming towards you.”

But that, dear reader, is another story….