A Goose Against the Moon | Jun Murai (Dean, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies)
2010.07.15
As I was waiting for my flight at JFK in New York, looking out the window from the waiting room, I was reminded of the same view I had seen from here on September 11, 2001. I remember seeing a plume of smoke rising from Manhattan in the distance, stretching horizontally at the same altitude. That experience is unforgettable, and I'll write about it somewhere else again, but I also saw the Concorde often at this airport and was frequently forced to ride on terrifyingly small propeller planes. In the United States, it's commonplace to fly, and many people even pilot their own planes.
During my student days, while visiting Berkeley, Bart Miller—who I think was still a student then but is now a professor at the University of Wisconsin—invited me out to eat, asking, "Jun, want to go get a meal?" He was a colleague of mine, working on the research and development of the same operating system (BSD, you know, the precursor to today's Apple OSX). Anyway, take a look at the photo onProf. Barton P Miller's Home Page. Those cute glasses are actually as thick as Coke-bottle bottoms. "Where are we going?" "Half Moon Bay." "Oh." Looking back now, it makes no sense to go from Berkeley to Half Moon Bay for dinner in the middle of a workday (it's far). The place he took me was, of all things, a flying club filled with small airplanes. A sense of dread washed over me at this new experience. "You've got to be kidding me, we're getting on a plane?" Bart told me, "You'll be my co-pilot," and gave me a brief explanation. "See the needle moving on that gauge there?" "No, it's not moving." He suddenly tapped the gauge a few times, and seeing it still wasn't working, he said, "Never mind." I mind! I definitely mind!
So, about the Coke-bottle glasses. I learned that the notion that you can't get a pilot's license without good eyesight is completely different in this country. After a terrifying flight, we landed at an airfield in the backyard of a restaurant in Half Moon Bay. At the entrance, there was a white plastic object that looked like two sleeping bags joined together vertically.
It was a pretty wonderful seafood restaurant, but the only other customers were a married couple. They asked, "Did you two fly in as well?" which made me wonder if this restaurant was exclusively for customers who arrive by plane. What surprised me was that when we left the restaurant later, the "sleeping bag" was gone! I asked Bart about it, and he explained, "Oh, that's a popular airplane kit. It's a two-seater. You sit one behind the other, and there's a propeller in the back. You can buy it through mail order, build it yourself, and once an inspector comes to check and approve it, you can fly it." No way, I thought. A flying sleeping bag? It's like a plastic model kit.
Perhaps because of experiences like this, I might be obsessed with the idea of a "flying car," and just last week, there was news about one. I thought they could pull it off in that country, but it looked more like a small airplane forced into being a car, which was different from my image. I sometimes bring this topic up in my classes, and most students still say it's better for cars not to fly. When I ask for their reasons, I'm impressed by their wonderful imagination. "It's dangerous because they could get caught in power lines." "The neighborhood would complain about the noise when you come home at night." But the next answer moved me deeply. SFC students are amazing!
"Professor, if you were looking at the moon in the night sky and a car flew by in front of it, it would ruin the moment."
(Date of publication: 2010/07/15)