Whereas, several test pilots might fly the prototype, each prototype is enrusted to only one mechanic. For him, I’m the pilot who is going to fly “his” plane and furnish him with the proof that the work he has lovingly and conscientiously put it on it all day, and sometimes all night, has not been in vain. The relation between the pilot, the plane and the mechanic are at once very simple – basic, obviously – and very complex when it comes to putting them into words. For the mechanic, the plane is a kind of Sleeping Beauty, and he takes care of her and coddles her while she is asleep. As soon as she wakes up, she passes into the hands of the pilots, but he only knows the plane when it is “alive”, when it is flying and functioning. The moment the plane takes off for a test, the mechanic loses sight of it, but he follows it, he feels it, he is bound to it by a kind of sixth sense, or to put it better, by an invisible umbilical cord.

Adapted from Read for Meaning.