“Grandpa, how does an airplane fly?”
“Well, it needs wind, speed and wings, just like a bird. An airplane can glide even without its propellers. Just with the wind, it can glide like an eagle high in the sky.”
“Grandpa, how far can you go in an airplane?”
“Oh, very far. You can cross the Atlantic Ocean and go all the way to America...but being an aviator is not for everyone. You must have passion, and love mathematics, and be so smart that you’re top of the class.”
“So it’s not easy to become a pilot?”
“Have you ever heard the stories by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, like The Little Prince?”
“No...are they like fairy tales?” asked the grandson.
“It’s a wonderful story; the perfect thing to read at night before you go to sleep. But that’s not the one I want to tell you today. I want to tell you a story about planes, those great machines built to fly across the planet.”
“Tell me, Grandpa!”
“Saint-Exupéry was a pilot himself, and he liked to tell stories about planes. My favourite is Night Flight. It’s a story about the station chief of a postal airline, a company that delivers mail. The station chief’s name was Rivière.”
“Like a river?”
“Exactly! And Rivière was a very intelligent man who put his heart and soul into his work. He knew that delivering mail was a very important task. The letters enabled families to stay in touch with each other from all over the world. They let people say that they missed and loved one another, and that they were thinking about their loved ones. And these letters also carried news about important events,” the grandfather went on.
“I like letters too, Grandpa, but nobody ever writes me. Still, I don’t know how to read yet so I suppose I don’t need to get any letters.”
“One day you’ll learn how to read and write, and you can send me all the letters you want to! I promise I’ll read them, no matter where I am. Anyway, Rivière wanted the letters to be delivered as fast as possible, because they were so important. That’s why he decided to transport them by plane – he knew it would be faster than the train, because planes can easily cross seas and oceans, and because they go so high up in the sky they can cover much greater distances than anything that travels on land, just like the birds.”
“Does that mean that birds are faster than leopards? Mummy says that leopards can run very fast.”
“Yes, some birds fly across the world every year, like geese for example...”
“Or the storks that deliver babies?”
“Yes, like the storks that come for the babies,” the grandfather said, mixing up his thoughts.
“And Santa’s sleigh? That goes fast too because it flies, doesn’t it? So that means that Santa’s reindeer are faster than leopards... but who’s fastest between geese, storks and reindeer?”
“I don’t know, but a plane is faster than all of them. Shall I finish the story? So Rivière was the boss, and he was very firm with his pilots. He realised that it was better to fly at night so they could save time by working during the day as well. The pilots were afraid, and they brought all their fears and perils onto the planes. It was very dangerous. Can you imagine being alone on a plane in the middle of the night, high up in the sky, bringing letters to all those families?”
“Did the planes crash?”
“One night a pilot died, and the letters never made it to their destinations. Rivière refused to change his methods, and he still insisted that pilots should be prepared to sacrifice themselves for their mission.”
“Like knights?”
“Yes, like all great heroes. Flying at night to bring the mail faster: that was the sacred mission of those pilots.”
“Grandpa, when I grow up I want to be a pilot too, and if I have to fly at night I’ll do it!”
Alan Alfredo Geday
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