City in the Sky

When you fly in an Airbus A380, you really are in a city in the sky. Dallas Campbell and Hannah Fry present this enjoyable documentary series.

This three part documentary looked at flights. How flights take off hopefully with your luggage. What it takes to feed the passengers in the plane. How pilots stay in lane when there are no lanes in the sky.

You see what happens to that luggage that never reunites with its owner. Worse those emergency situations. An airport in Maine that is there for emergency landings. A doctor on call, not on the plane but is contacted to talk through the crew in case of a passenger in a medical emergency.

There were a lot of fascinating insights in this series. Landing in Bhutan when you do not have much of an airstrip. How signs, floor coverings and lighting is use to get guide passengers at an airport. The journey luggage makes in Dubai airport and you are left wondering if horses suffer from jet lag.

Ditch the presenters, both as bad and amateurish as each other, get a decent writer, and this could have been a worthwhile series to watch. As it stands, it was hard to get through. A good example was the presenters' glee in bidding at the mega unclaimed bag auction. Any presenters or writers with half a brain or sense of decency/empathy would have said "Wait, what? How could ONE bag ever go unclaimed, much less the ten quadzillion bags in these auctions." That was the question that kept hammering at me, and they didn't give it a moment's thought save for a half-hearted "Oh a bit sad" from the female as she happily trawled through what might well have been a child's prized and loved clothing and possessions. 2/10 is generous.

As someone whose job had me flying as a passenger more days than not for a couple of years, aviation has long been of interest to me. And this series has plenty of interesting content in it, with all the interconnected human and technological elements that keep the systems running. Yet for some reason I was never able to stay awake through an entire episode. My wife also tried to watch a couple of episodes with me and it had the same effect on her. I honestly think the producers have stumbled upon a rhythm between the narration and music that is sleep inducing.

My somewhat facetious theory is that the entire purpose of this documentary was to deliver this line:

Spoken in a most grave tone: "Across the US, aircraft consume 63 million gallons (of fuel) a day. The global supply chains delivering all this fuel must be totally reliable. The taps must never be allowed to run dry."