Airplanes and red shoes

Let's start with a riddle: What do aeroplanes, sugarlumps and red dancing shoes have in common?

No, sorry, you can't have the answer yet.

This blog is all about aeroplanes, and some worries I have...

Now don't get me wrong, I love flying. Rollercoasters and football matches do nothing for me: when I'm looking for excitement, the buzz is best when that juddering aircraft leaves the tarmac, and I'm flying off to somewhere new and exciting. And as for the feeling I get when I'm up in the sky looking down on the clouds. Well, if you ask me, it's quite obviously magic, and it's marvellous!

But a friend sent me this video, and it has made me think that maybe we're doing just a little bit too much flying. Have a quick look at it before you read on (if you haven't already) so you'll know what I'm talking about...

Now, at one level, I think the video is rather beautiful. It reminds me of other things, like ripples and magnetic field patterns and the dances that bees do to find their way home. But these are aeroplanes, not bees.

Do you know how many flights there are, globally, each day or each year? Go on, have a guess...

The most reliable source I could find on t'interweb said there were 77 million flights in 2008, and numbers are rising. 77 million each year?! That's about 211,000 flights each day! And there were 4.874 billion passengers... Which, frankly, is such a BIG number that my poor brain can't even process it.

Now, I could go off on all sorts of interesting diversions about global economics ('cos this many passengers equals one hell of big pile of dollars, dunnit?!) and international development inequalities ('cos look at how the flight-paths predominantly zoom in and out of the US and Europe) ... But the big question this video has raised for me is about saturation.

Saturation, I hear you say. What, if you please, is saturation? Or rather (given that my readers are educated people) what on earth has saturation got to do with air traffic?!

Let me explain myself...

Saturation is what you get when you try to add too much of something to something else. So, you can add sugarlumps to tea, and go on adding them for a long time, making your tea sweeter and sweeter... But there comes a point where your tea can't absorb anything else; and if you go on trying to add sugar, it won't dissolve, and you'll get a lumpy mess. You see, the tea has reached its 'sugar saturation point', and it just can't take any more.

There are lots of other examples where a little bit of something is fine, but too much is not. The odd whisky (or wine or beer or whatever your tipple) is great, but too much alcohol becomes a problem. And a little bit of food down the plughole is OK when you are washing up, but half a plateful will block your pipes!

I suppose I'm worried that we might just have reached our 'aeroplane saturation point'. At least, I'd like to know what or where this point is. Perhaps 55 million planes a year was OK, but 77 million isn't. Or perhaps 78 million is OK, but 79 million will be too many. Do you get my drift? It would be useful to know, wouldn't it, just how many aeroplanes the planet can cope with.

Now, at the risk of getting all earnest here, maybe we should be asking the same question about everything we do, at a personal and global level. Basically, the question is, how much is enough?

Do you know The Red Shoes fairytale? I may tell you more about it another time, but for now, all you need to know is that the central character loved her red shoes so much that she wore them too often, and went dancing in them when she shouldn't have, and then couldn't stop dancing until someone cut off her feet with an axe.

And that, in a nutshell, is what aeroplanes, sugarlumps and red dancing shoes have in common. When it comes to things we like, we're not good at knowing when enough is enough.

And no, I'm not being puritanical.

You know I have an interest in go-going with the flow, dontcha? Well, so, I'm not saying don't dance; I'm saying we need to know when to stop, if we want to go-go with joy. Dance all night if you like, but make sure you can stop when you want, without needing someone to chop your feet off!

So if any of you know how to work out the global aeroplane saturation point, please let the rest of us know!

Flow x