The first time I flew was in 1977, in a Dart Herald turboprop airliner from Gatwick, England, to Le Touquet, France. I sat in a double seat to myself whilst my mother and father sat behind me. I was nervous. My father was an ex-military pilot and, whilst mother raved about the tickle you get in your tummy as the aircraft rotates, father was most reassuring that there was nothing at all to be concerned about.
“The most dangerous moments are take-off and landing.”
“Take-off?” said I to mother. “That’s when you get the tickle in your tummy?”
“That’s right!”
I moved to my father: “And why is it so dangerous?”
He laughed matter-of-factly: “Because the plane’s full of fuel!”
I turned back round to contemplate this information and, after a moment, peeked back through the crack between the seats.
“Take-off’s what we’re about to do, then?”
“Yes.”
“And there’s nothing to be worried about?” I asked.
“Shouldn’t be,” he said. He trusted Handley Page. After all, he’d flown them himself: Halifax bombers. Handley Page was my first flight and it was Britain’s first aircraft maker. I always cherished an affection for the Dart Herald, especially because mine didn’t crash.
Image: a Handley Page Dart Herald turboprop aircraft in the service of British United Airways. http://www.aerobernie.bplaced.net/BUA.html.
In the film adaptation of Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith, there is a clear response to the fear of flying: “Never, ever worry about something you can do absolutely nothing about.” And, if that applies to only half-murdering one of the three men you thought you had murdered in a toilet on the Berlin-Düsseldorf express, then it certainly applies to taking off from Gatwick Airport in a Dart Herald turboprop airliner. To that extent flying has much in common with murder, a fact not many will be aware of, since a gratifyingly small number of us ever engage in the act of murder (at least in toilets on fast trains from Berlin to Düsseldorf).
However, there is another activity that is surprisingly similar to flying, in which considerably more people engage than engage in murder on the North-Rhine-Westphalian express, and that is setting up a small business. In running a business, the three crucial phases, like those of flight, are take-off, glideslope and landing. And they all bode similar dangers, as my father had alluded to in 1977.
When you fly, take-off involves a little bit of taxying, fastening your seatbelt and revving the engines up to maximum thrust before you let go the brakes and hit, what you hope will be, V1, VR and then V2. Tuck the undercarriage into their bays and soar into the sky.
At the end of the journey, you need to get the thing back down on the ground again. If it’s a business, you might sometimes parachute out rather than landing, and the heftier the golden handshake as you jump, the softer—paradoxically—will be your landing. Actually getting the aircraft down to the ground is then left to someone else. Now, strange to relate, but every company comes down in the end. There has not yet ever been a company that didn’t end, unless those in existence right now are the first. Empirically, that’s an impossibility; in theory they could set a precedent. (As an aside, that is a perversion of nature and of the fundamental precept on which democracy is based: no individual person can live for ever, so therefore no legal person should be able to live for ever. It goes against the law of God (if you happen to place trust in God in the particular currency jurisdiction in which you live). Enough asides.)
If it is you who lands your aircraft, you need to identify your landing place, do some calculations for wind and weather, and stabilise the aircraft on a glideslope: the imaginary line down which the aeroplane will descend until its wheels strike the landing strip. Glideslopes are best established direct from a descent from cruising altitude, but a pilot is allowed to dip below the prescribed glideslope a little and then correct it before stabilising: if they do that too late, then they should instead go around to try again.
Landing is where, with a classic jetliner (one nose wheel and two sets of landing gear by the wings), the main gear strikes the landing strip first and the pilot drops the nose before reverse thrusting and braking to bring the aircraft to a controlled taxi pace or halt. In some aircraft, like the Douglas DC-3, the main gear lands, followed by dropping the tail, not nose, wheel.
It’s all fairly technical, needs quite a lot of mathematics, a fair amount of steady hands and cool heads, usually succeeds and can in some cases go spectacularly wrong. Just like running a business.
When a business takes off, it needs capital. You might be itching to get into, say, the bakery business, but where will your shop be? Who will pay for your oven? How will you survive until your first loaves are sold? Who will put up the seed capital? Once you find your finance, you need to put it into a business plan, which will be filed at the companies registry along with your application for registration and your application for a VAT number. And it needs to be enough capital to tide you over until you hit the big time, for two years, otherwise you’re personally liable for any bankruptcy. That all is equivalent to tanking up your fuel and revving the engines to taxi to the start of the runway. Once you get your enterprise number, it’s chocks away! and off you rumble down the runway. V1, means there’s no turning back. VR is rotation, nose wheel off the ground (a tickle in your tummy), V2, take off, climbing speed, gear up: the sky’s the limit.
Insurance companies that move out of a sector or type of insurance enter into a phase known as run-off. The existing policies are administered and closed down as customers slowly cancel, for whatever reason, but no new business is taken on; the same can be said for a lot of small businesses. They will slowly wind down (without, hopefully, being wound up). This is the equivalent to establishing the aircraft on its downward glideslope.
When an aircraft lands, the aim is that it should flare just before striking the earth (it’s slightly different on a DC-3, which lands with its roll axis parallel, and its pitch axis perpendicular, to the ground). Flaring is a technique that brings the main gear onto the earth as gently as possible, with the pilot slowly dropping the nose gear to the ground (and then standing up to take a bow as the passengers erupt into spontaneous applause—usually on Alitalia).
If the aircraft does not flare properly, there is a danger that the undercarriage could get damaged. The aircraft is unlikely to make a hole in the runway, but when a business lands, it can easily make a meteoric crater in the tarmac.
In the world of one-man businesses, as opposed to aviation, the phrase the sky’s the limit is not simply an aspiration; it is in many ways a sine qua non. Your tax liabilities and your social security liabilities all need to be very carefully monitored to make sure that you prudently put enough to one side to meet the demands of uncompromising institutions like banks, tax authorities, social security institutions (and other similar protection rackets). If earnings start to fall (due to the loss of a major customer, a shift in market tendencies or the introduction of new technologies), a high-flying business can suddenly find itself flaming out, and this is something that has been happening across the translation sector of late.
Fairly decent translations are now available from AI and most people will satisfy themselves with these. Licences for large corporations are fairly cheap, far cheaper than having work done by humans, and this general cheapness has a depressing effect on the charges that a human can bill when they do get engaged to do work that’s not so well done by machines, like translating poetry or novels or official documentation. Machines need human translators to keep them in check, (for the time being at least, rather than vice versa, which will come, sure as God made little green Apple Macs), but the rates that humans can command have plummeted in the past five years, because verification work is no longer measured up against the cost of human translation but instead against the freebie that is offered by Google Translate.
Whatever their sector may be, whether retail clothing, tobacconist, car mechanic, thatcher, when a business ceases to be viable owing to the paucity of customers, it can take some time for the owner of the small business to become cognisant of the fact. In short, they press on undaunted, ever hopeful that things will get better. Back in the aeroplane cockpit, it’s the equivalent of knowing when stabilisation has not been established and there’s a need for a go-around. (Either that, or a crash landing.)
As long as the business is in existence at all, the tax authorities and the social security authority will gladly inform the business owner of the duties they owe under the relevant legislation as the aircraft slowly descends toward the runway. The runway is a thin strip of land that separates the air in which aeroplanes can fly, from the earth in which they can very easily come to grief. It is constructed of formation and tarmacadam, POPI lights and painted lines, but, relative to the height from which an aircraft descends, it is wafer thin, and the earth beneath it is miles thick. If the air above is likened to a flourishing business, the earth beneath can be likened to a claim for … unemployment benefit.
It is not beyond all contemplation that someone who once owned a thriving small business in a sector that has since suffered inroads from technology might be reduced to having to switch sector, and even claim unemployment benefit to tide over the hiatus between one status and the other. The irony is that both the authority that assumes you’re doing well, and the authority that will help the job-seeking unemployed, will only consider your existence in the context of being on one or the other side of that line. Neither will ease your passage from (a) self-employment into unemployment, or indeed (b) from unemployment into self-employment (but, rather, in the latter case, only into employment).
To start a business, it is seed capital that one needs to garner from third parties; to save a business, it is likewise seed capital that one needs, and, again, it’s from third parties it needs garnering. One finds oneself in a predicament as one transitions from self-employment into unemployment, a switch that holds no benefit at all for the formerly self-employed, since their social security status precludes the payment of any benefits: their social security contributions are essentially a statutory savings plan for their state pension, but don’t cover unemployment benefits. This is ironic, since the fund they have paid into is part and parcel of the demise of their business, since social security is not proportional, like tax, but gets paid in fixed amounts according to a scale of thresholds (hence a minimum amount is always payable, even if earnings are zero).
If you want to save your employment status after losing your salaried job, unemployment gives you a breathing space in which to rev up your engines for the next take-off. If you want to save your self-employment status after losing customers, then, there is no one there to help you. The tax and social security authorities only care about you if you’re still in the air, regardless of how close you might be to the ground. The welfare office, on the other hand, will only help you once you’ve crashed. Neither of them will look across the line on which you stand: that thin line of tarmac which separates the sky above from the earth below, in which we bury our dead.
It’s like being lost between the approach and tower radio frequencies: neither of them is hollering at you pull up, pull up!