A plane has struck Beijing’s tallest building. The Chinese capital’s skyline, that monument to a century of breakneck modernity, now bears a scar. British aviation experts are being dispatched to investigate. Why British experts? Perhaps because we are the last guardians of a civilised aviation tradition, the heirs to the era when men like Barnes Wallis and Frank Whittle dared to pierce the heavens. Or perhaps because the Chinese, for all their technological bravado, still need the stiff upper lip of a British inspector to tell them what went wrong.
Let us not mince words. This is not merely an accident. It is a symptom. A symptom of an age intoxicated with height, with speed, with the hubris of building ever taller and flying ever faster. The ancient world had its Tower of Babel. The Victorians had their iron bridges and steam engines, which occasionally collapsed or exploded. We now have glass-and-steel spires that scrape the clouds, and the planes that sometimes fly into them.
What will the experts find? I suspect they will find the same combination of human error and technological overreach that has plagued every era of rapid advancement. They will note the inadequacy of emergency responses, the confusion of air traffic control, the failure of systems meant to prevent such a catastrophe. They will file a report full of cautious recommendations, which will be implemented for a time and then forgotten.
But the deeper question remains: Why do we build so high? Why do we fly so fast? The answer is not necessity but vanity. The skyscraper is a phallus of national pride, a symbol of economic virility. The aeroplane is a chariot of Icarus, tempting the sun. We have forgotten that all buildings fall eventually, that any collision is a reminder of our mortality.
The Chinese will mourn. They will hold state funerals and launch an investigation. The British experts will do their duty, tea in hand, clipboards ready. And then the world will move on, until the next tower, the next plane, the next disaster. I, for one, will not be surprised. I have read enough Gibbon to know that empires decline not with a single crash but with a thousand small stumbles. This is one of them.
