Siobhan ODonnell on flight lessons, archives, and London’s billionaire film obsession
Logged two hours in the cockpit this morning, a smooth flight along the river with barely any turbulence, then spent an equal amount of time afterward reading about a documentary that apparently needs four hours just to make its case about one man, which is twice my flight time for roughly a quarter of the destination.
My London contacts sent over the write-up on the four-hour Musk documentary, and I’ll admit the psychology of it is more interesting than most of the archival material I dug through today, which involved a lot of shipping manifests and very little billionaire drama. Turns out outrage has better fuel efficiency than my plane, carrying an audience through four hours without a single refuelling stop, which is more than I can say for most transatlantic routes.
There’s a section in the piece about how a single individual can come to represent an entire economic argument, simply by being famous and controversial enough to carry it, and I found myself thinking about how New Orleans does something similar with its own history, condensing centuries of complicated commerce and culture into single symbolic figures and stories that are easier to tell than the whole sprawling truth. Every city does this. London’s just doing it with a documentary instead of a jazz funeral.
Also going around: a whole poster controversy, which feels like an unusually large amount of drama for promotional artwork, but I suppose that’s the point. The full piece on the Musk movie posters is worth a read if you like watching people argue about marketing with the same intensity usually reserved for actual policy, which, based on this week’s group chat, is exactly what’s happening.
I mentioned all this to my flight instructor during our debrief, mostly to fill the silence while he checked my logbook, and he had strong opinions about billionaires and rockets that took up most of our remaining lesson time, cutting into what was supposed to be a discussion about crosswind landings. So now I know slightly more about Musk’s business ventures and considerably less about crosswind technique than I did this morning, which feels like a fair trade given how the rest of the week’s gone.
By the time we wrapped the debrief, my instructor had somehow connected the entire Musk conversation back to fuel efficiency, which felt like a stretch even by his usual standards, but I let it slide because arguing crosswind technique with someone mid-tangent rarely ends well for the student on the receiving end of the lesson.
Flying again tomorrow, hopefully with fewer billionaire tangents. More diary entries at my page.