This profile is the model of a wing section.
It's called a wingspan.
And this, in particular, is called Gottinga 398:
is the wing section of this small tourist plane.
The wing is pushed into the air,
which divides at this point, which is the leading edge,
and creates that magic that's called lift.
And so we trivialized dozens of years of aerodynamics studies
in a split second.
This is true for both small and large aircraft:
so, for example, we can go to an exotic place, on vacation,
thousands of kilometres away with a few hours flying -
of course, when possible.
Increasing the angle between the wing and the air flow,
you can have a lot of lift
even when the wing moves at a relatively slow speed,
how it happens - how it must happen! - during landing and take-off.
But, there's a but:
if the angle increases beyond a limit angle,
which is called critical angle,
a phenomenon occurs whereby the lift, sometimes suddenly, stops.
We give a name to many phenomena:
and this, which is important, as you can guess,
makes no exception.
And in Italian, we call it "Stallo" [Stalemate].
What a strange word the stalemate is.
It is said: "The formation of the Government is stalled";
"The meeting came to a standstill."
But also in more trivial things: if we are on a diet,
"The loss of pounds has stalled."
We associate the word "Stallo" with immobilism, with non-action:
yet, if a wing has a lift, and stalls,
suddenly it can only do what it can do:
that is to fly ballistically towards the ground,
fall or something.
The English use a very similar word, "stall."
Spanish people say "perdida" instead
which is a term that evokes something much more serious.
The Germans, who are always very accurate,
they call it "Strömungsabrisse", which means "demolition of the flow":
very technical.
All in all, I prefer the term we attribute.
I didn't show up: I'm an astronomer, I build telescopes,
tools that I launch into space, at the conquest of planets or comets;
or that we mount on telescopes
in the most hidden places on our planet,
for example on top of the Hawaii Islands or the Canary Islands,
or in the desert of Chile, Arizona or California.
For work, whenever possible,
I move a lot with commercial traffic.
And when the plane, until almost twenty years ago,
has some modest turbulence,
I usually get nervous, I start sweating,
open the air vent;
and I begin to express, perhaps aloud, my opinion
that maybe it isn't worth the risk
for the mirrors, or the lenses, that we're trying to study.
And of course, my colleagues don't miss an opportunity to gloat,
pointing out
that my expressions, sometimes very colorful,
are at odds with statistical evidence
that flights, transports by commercial plane,
remain one of the most statistically secure systems.
And so happens what I couldn't have foreseen either,
and that many friends would not have suspected at all:
in 2004, in a summer of complete loneliness -
let's say unlucky in love -
I sign up - like this, just to do something new,
something strange, something life-changing,
I take flying lessons, and it's a revelation to me.
Looking at the world from above is a fantastic, magical thing;
I buy an old tourist plane right away,
with two partners,
with which we spend more time fixing it than flying it.
Besides, I think with that little plane
we never left the Mugello Valley,
from which we had our first flights.
And all the people who come to this world
ask, perhaps frightened, what happens
when the engine that moves these planes - which is very small - shuts down.
The plane becomes a kind of glider:
it's not much of a glider, but it's what we need right now.
And technically,
you can even land the plane in a tiny square of land.
In the course, this manoeuvre - simulated, but not so much -
although with an instructor at your side ready to handle the situation,
is performed over and over again.
Strange as it may seem,
most fatal accidents in this world,
does not occur due to lack of propulsion,
which, however, is now an extremely rare phenomenon,
apart from cases of gross errors,
such as running out of fuel;
but rather, because during the slow flight,
maybe just in the take-off and landing phases,
you can't keep between you and the stalemate
all those intervals, those obstacles, that distance
that they teach you obsessively, during the course, to keep.
Because stalemate can also be something natural:
you're flying, and maybe one of the two wings stalls;
and if, for example, you stall with the right wing,
the plane suddenly starts pointing its nose
in the opposite direction to the one you're flying:
can be very confusing.
Moreover, the stall can be solved in a relatively simple way:
you just deliberately crash the plane for a few seconds,
so that this one picks up speed and starts to have lift again.
This is an unnatural move that is taught to the pilot
so that you avoid,
when the aircraft is losing altitude,
to try to put your nose up,
which would further worsen the situation:
but rather to promote, second it.
It is an unnatural move, obsessively taught to the student,
and which is summed up in the phrase: "In flight, speed is life".
And so, we get to the stall date,
which in my case happens at 12:17 on July 17th, 2011.
The appointment is not in Samarkand, but in Massalengo, near Milan,
where I am a passenger on the plane of a friend of mine who is flying.
I was an instructor at the time,
but it's just a fun flight.
It happens because we don't prevent a series of mistakes,
and we only rush to fix it at the last minute.
Because in these little planes,
although they are slower than commercial traffic,
actually, flying quite low compared to scheduled aircraft,
there's no time to review the footage of your life,
like we hear in passengers
of a plane that undergoes some emergency.
Plus, in that case someone else is flying for you,
and this is certainly not the case here.
With these little planes, everything happens damn fast:
the stalling plane, the crashing plane on one side,
me returning to command -
all these planes have dual controls, as in driving schools;
the aeroplane regaining speed, lift;
and yet, unfortunately, at that point we are very low:
we have trees in front of us.
And the words resonate in my ears
that the instructors have told me a thousand times,
and that I myself keep telling my students.
That is, when we are slow, and we have an obstacle before us,
trying to fly over it, getting the plane up even higher,
could be hopeless.
Much better to get into the treetops,
rather than running the risk of stalling in front of it, or over it.
I meditated for a long time
if I had the opportunity to acknowledge this mistake earlier,
and on my obviously erroneous assessment
that verbally alerting my flightmate,
who was in charge,
was sufficient to solve the issue.
There's nothing to do:
when you're 300 feet off the ground, with a stalled wing,
you must not think, you must act.
And so I did.
We went into the treetop,
the crown dampened the speed of the plane,
a trunk has ripped one of the wings apart,
we landed upside down on the edge of a canal.
Damage to aircraft tanks
made the gasoline leak out, so the plane didn't lit.
We came out in a bit of a trouble:
I was almost unharmed,
my flight companion had the need
of a few weeks of hospital,
a few months to recuperate.
But we both flew back together as soon as we could.
Because, by stealing a term from the horse racing,
"Saddle hurts, saddle heals":
so, even though I had to use violence,
I tried as soon as I could to fly back.
Of course, the world has changed, not just in the way we fly.
Now I'm doing it in a much wiser and much more rational way,
perhaps obsessively analyzing weather conditions
or the conditions of the runway where I must land;
or by continually testing me in marginal conditions,
but in a safe situation,
to avoid having to do it suddenly,
in the face of a genuine emergency.
And so, you learn that being defensive
doesn't necessarily mean taking a step back,
but rather to be able to have the awareness
of when taking a step back is the only possible way.
So, don't stop flying, absolutely:
on the contrary, almost fly more.
But to do so with an awareness of that information
that until that moment you had only read in the books,
had been told to you by a lot of other people -
on the other hand, we cannot make all the possible mistakes in our lives -
and all of a sudden seep into your pores.
And the whole world suddenly takes on a completely different flavor.
Suddenly, everything becomes a bonus, everything becomes free;
and so you find yourself celebrating the anniversaries of this rebirth.
Soon it'll be ten years from now,
and I can't wait to celebrate adulthood.
And learn to try to do
those things you left out, thinking you were going to do later,
and risked remaining pure fantasies.
You understand the significance of doing, compared to discussing,
how easy it is to fall into unnecessary and endless discussions,
that are different from achieving a goal,
from achieving a result.
And the accident as a metaphor for so many things that happen in life.
When you have to make a quick decision to do something "wrong,"
like throwing yourself into the treetops,
because you deem it the lesser evil,
and the irrelevance of the endless discussions
that you can do, maybe sitting in a bar,
compared to what was more or less appropriate to do.
And also the inevitability of what's beautiful.
The incontrovertible fact that flying on an aircraft,
and look at the world from above,
or look at the sky with a telescope that's never been built before,
conceal such beautiful things inside them
to make this drive incredible,
and prevent us from not continuing to do so.
Were they, were we lucky?
I just acted in the way that, in flight manuals,
can be found under "Recovery of the stalemate"?
Maybe I should have hung the cloche on the nail.
as they say,
so as to put in the most abject way between me and the source of the risk
a distant root, in order to simply prevent this risk?
I don't know.
This second chance
accompanies me, invisible, for almost ten years,
and I'm not sure I used it the best way.
But I'm sure, incontrovertibly certain,
to keep trying to do it with all my will.