Wild Life

Aidan Hartley

21 February 2009

Flying high

36,000 feet

When I was a teenager on a flight to Nairobi I sat next to a pretty Kenyan girl the same age as me. We got talking. Out of the blue at 36,000 feet she slipped me a scrap of paper on which was scrawled, ‘I LOVE YOU.’ ‘That’s nice,’ I said. I did nothing about it. On another flight back to school in England we got delayed in Zurich, where an attractive older female passenger bummed a cigarette off me. When we reached London she took me back to her posh London flat. ‘Aha,’ I thought. She quite literally showed me her engravings, things got steamy and yet at the crucial moment I bailed. Today I naturally regret turning down such opportunities for casual sex.

As an adult I found myself taking an altogether different sort of flight. En route to Congo the passenger in 34B was a desperate man forced by bankruptcy into smuggling precious stones and metals. Kinshasa’s airport in those days teemed with bandits in uniform, and the week before they had robbed my fellow traveller of $30,000 in gold dust. Now he was returning with a briefcase stuffed with borrowed money and pure fear in his eyes. Another time I sat next to a Somali guerrilla fighter known as Ahmed the ‘Plunderer’. Entering rebel territory, the engine developed a technical problem and the pilot turned back. ‘When this happens,’ the guerrilla said, ‘do not be disappointed. Give thanks to Allah.’ A month later the Plunderer made the same trip without me and soon after landing he was gunned down. My closest shave was on a Boeing 737 that crashed in Addis Ababa. As the portside wing ripped off and we ploughed off the runway, I recall the Sudanese man on the other side of the aisle pointing out of the porthole and screaming at me, ‘It is burning! We are burning!’

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