Florentine Notebook -- Inflight Insomnia

A Florentine Notebook

Inflight Insomnia

check my watch and—groan!—it's quarter-to-four in the morning, Italian time. My mind—scared senseless by the idea of heading sleepless into tomorrow's jet lag—insists that I get some shut eye. However, my body—pig-headed creature of habit that it is—inists that it's only quarter-to-ten in the evening Toronto time, so sleep is out of the question. Mind and body wage a brief, fitful battle, but body wins out in the end. So I find myself wide awake, 37,000 feet over France, and still two hours out of Rome.

So, with my usual diversions—books, magazines, crossword puzzles—somehow unappealing, I order a beer and crack open my Italian/English dictionary to troll for some interesting Italian words:

     momentaneamente....temporarily
     infruttuoso........unprofitable
     spregiudicatezza...broadmindedness
     polverizzazione....pulverization
     analfabetismo......illiteracy
     idiosincrasia......allergy
     nebulizzatore......atomizer

Okay, I'm still an hour and fifty-five minutes out of Rome, so that killed about 5 minutes. I can be so precise about the time remaining because the screen at the front of the cabin displays a few constantly-updated statistics about the flight. Here's the latest:

     GROUND SPEED              1048 KM/H
     ALTITUDE                    11300 M
     OUTSIDE AIR TEMPERATURE       -48°C
     TAIL WIND                  124 KM/H 
     TIME TO DESTINATION            1:55
     ESTIMATED TIME OF ARRIVAL   5:45 AM
     DISTANCE TO DESTINATION     1690 KM
     DISTANCE FROM DEPARTURE     5310 KM

Earlier in the flight, I got a real rush watching these numbers. The TAIL WIND ("Vento a favore" is the optimistic Italian translation) number hovered around 80 km/h at the beginning of the flight, and the GROUND SPEED number drifted around 1,000 km/h. After a while, however, I noticed that the TAIL WIND figure was climbing and, with each increase, the GROUND SPEED value would head north as well. That 80 km/h tail wind was now up to 85...90...95...100 km/h!

I was reading while this was going on, but each time I looked up the tail wind was faster and so was our speed. I began rooting (to myself, of course) for upcoming milestones; 100 km/h was a big one and occassioned a silent cheer. 110...120...130. Jeezus, are we bumper-hitching some kind of hurricane, or what? 140...150 (another cheer) ...160. By this time our speed is approaching 1,100 km/h! (Strangely, though, our ESTIMATED TIME OF ARRIVAL never budged. We were wailing along 10% faster than our initial velocity, yet somehow we weren't going to arrive any sooner. Did our pilots somehow know this killer tail wind was lying in wait?) 170...180..190.

At about this point I started wondering if this wasn't becoming too much of a good thing. Could the plane handle the stress? Was there some all-important rivet, its functional lifespan already nearly used up after years of blameless service, ready to give up the ghost at some specific speed threshold? 195...196...197. My worried mind saw 200 km/h as the make-or-break number. I was just about to shout out some kind of William Shatnerish "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" warning when the reprieve came: 190...180...170. Within a couple of minutes, the tail wind dropped about 70 km/h and our speed lessened accordingly. I let out a sigh of relief and was glad to see the screen's stats dropped in favor of the inflight movie. All was well once again.

Florentine Notebook On the Train