Risk Wise by Polly Morland

Author:Polly Morland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

The building’s owner is standing by the front door.

‘In the beginning,’ he says, to no one in particular, ‘we were thinking we were going to renovate it, but then—’ He leaves the sentence unfinished.

Tim walks by him and says, ‘Time to move on. It’ll be gone in three days.’ Then he adds, ‘So that’s that,’ and he takes off his hard hat and heads back to the car.

6

Up in the air

An even more prolific coffee drinker than Timothy D. Lynch was the twinkly-eyed philosopher Voltaire – upwards of fifty cups a day would arguably give anyone twinkly eyes – and rumours abound that Candide, his great critique of optimism in a risky world, was written during a single brief caffeinated frenzy. It was in his Dictionnaire philosophique, however, published five years later, that Voltaire wrote something that finds echoes amid the inevitably crumbling edifices of New York City. ‘We are all formed of frailty and error,’ he wrote. ‘Let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature.’

Now, on the whole, it is hard to fault a plea for tolerance, even one as pessimistic as this, for that is the context in which Voltaire’s assertion is made. But home in for a moment, if you will, on the second of those weaknesses he mentions: error.

Error may be all very well in certain contexts. Everyone makes mistakes; we all know that. It is how we learn and grow, as the children of Plas Madoc’s junk playground have shown. Moreover, in adult life, our little blunders stand testimony to our humanity, proof that we are not machines, vital signs of our capacity for change and invention. Yet there are some situations in which error simply cannot and will not be tolerated – indeed, in which even the chance of screwing up, however vanishingly slim, would be considered an aberration, the kind of risk that we should never, ever run.

Adrian Dolan’s is one such world. Indeed, his is not a story about risk at all, so much as a story about risk aversion. And it is a risk aversion so nuanced, so finely honed and indeed so systematised, as to create one of the safest risk environments (or the riskiest safe environments) in the world.

* * *

Ady, as everyone calls him, is an air traffic controller at the busiest airport in the UK and the busiest dual-runway airport in the world, London Heathrow. Here an average of 1,350 planes take off and land every day, which in aviation rush hour can amount to up to a hundred planes an hour. In air traffic control terms, it is one of the top jobs, like playing first violin in the New York Philharmonic or striker for Chelsea FC.

Sitting at the foot of the 87-metre control tower in a bland, modern meeting room with a door of poster-paint green and a table of poster-paint blue, Ady Dolan cuts an affable, reliable figure, very clear, calm and, dare one say it, very controlled.

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