THE FASTER LANE / TYLER BRÛLÉ
High hopes
When was the last time you flew? I’m not talking about a flight on a highly automated Airbus shuttling from Paris to Madrid, or a Boeing between LAX and JFK. I’m talking about real flying, complete with propeller, super-short take-offs, fast climbs, a connection to the gusts, pressure changes all around and a Monocle editor acting as chief flight attendant – that would be me, by the way.
On Friday morning, a group of Monocle subscribers walked across the tarmac at Zürich airport, climbed the stairs into the cabin of a Pilatus PC-12 and 50 minutes later were on approach to the grass runway at Venice’s Lido airport with me in charge of relaying announcements from the cockpit. “The captain said the airport doesn’t open till 9.00 so we’re going to do a little loop over Venice,” I explained to my passengers while collecting coffee cups, stowing away bottles and taking a generally lax attitude to the rest of the cabin arrangement – seats in recline, some angled outwards, bags resting here and there. (In case you thought I was joking two weeks ago when I said we’d be doing a special archi-tour of the Venice Biennale for Monocle readers, we ended up being over-subscribed.) Two minutes later we made a gentle turn over Lido and the runway came into view. “Oh, you were serious about the runway,” said one of the passengers seated beside the cargo door at the back. At this point, she joined the rest of us as we fixed our gaze beyond the cockpit windshield and watched the pilots guide in for a mattress-soft landing. Moments later we came to a stop in front of the Aeroporto Nicelli’s vaguely fascist terminal building, the captain lowered the stairs and the cabin filled with the scents of freshly cut grass and the Adriatic.
“It feels like we could easily be in one of Italy’s former African colonies,” commented a passenger as he walked down the stairs. “Asmara perhaps?” Swapping hats from chief flight attendant to general manager of ground services, I collected passports, chatted to the tanned gentlemen in charge of arrivals and, less than a minute later, we were striding out of the terminal and heading for the jetty. As we waited for the water taxi to pull up, two ambulance boats sped into the canal, lights flashing and staff at the ready. As patients were transferred into ambulances of the wheeled variety, we were reminded how everything comes with considerably greater complexity in Venice: four or five attendants per boat, and how do they get the ill and injured out of those narrow apartments with cage-style lifts built for one, or only with stairs? Ten minutes later we were at the Giardini and already there were plenty of journalists, diplomats, architects and academics having their third espresso and fifth cigarette of the morning. At the Paradiso, our little group was joined by our editors Nolan and Nic, and after a short briefing and coffees that were far better than what I had to work with in my tiny aircraft galley, we made our way to a series of private tours at the US, Russian and Danish pavilions.
En route to the Japanese pavilion (one of the more clever and moving concepts this year as it dealt with depopulation rather than the more predictable themes of crowding) we bumped into a sizeable delegation from the UAE. Then we had to skirt around a group of secret-service men who’d formed a human wall around a few State Department officials, who in turn were checking out the impressive US pavilion that at first glance looks almost Thai, until the curators explain that it’s a metaphor for US industrialisation, ingenuity and spontaneity.
By late morning the sun was out, the haze had lifted and we opted for lunch at the Cipriani, which ended up going much longer than I’d budgeted for in my schedule. Still, no one was complaining as this was Venice free from jumbo cruise-liners, heaving tour boats and mobs from China wielding selfie-sticks.
Post-lunch was a bit slower for our group. A couple of bottles of Jermann chardonnay can have this effect, when combined with a substantial lunch. The Arsenale offered some more focused themes (an excellent mini expo about Beirut and its historical and future challenges in terms of planning and building) along with some rather abstract expressions that left a few of us bewildered and wondering why they hadn’t used the past year to delete them from the Biennale altogether.
With the immigration office set to close at 18.45 sharp at the little airport, there was just enough time for a quick end-of-day recap with our editors and then it was back across the lagoon and straight onto the plane. I’ll skip the details of the rain we flew into (yes, more real flying!) on approach to Zürich and leave it that we were back on safe ground an hour and ten minutes later. We’re hoping to do more of these as the right events present themselves – in all corners of the world. For more on Venice, please pick up a copy of our special edition newspaper or order here. As ever, all questions and comments can be sent to me at tb@monocle.com.
