LOGANAIR Trislander, 290

During the 1970s and early ‘80s, well before the time of email, texting, and the rest, a close friend, “JD”, and myself were in the habit of regularly sending one another postcards. I received one such card in 1981, sent from Shetland to my home in Leeds during a visit JD had made to the islands that year. I still have the card today. The postmark indicates it was sent on 22nd June, 1981, but there is no greeting or news about the trip, just my handwritten address, the franked stamp, and the information supplied by the publisher of the card. The photograph, attributed to Steven Gibson, shows, as indicated by the caption beneath it, a “LOGANAIR Trislander” light aircraft, cheerily painted in black, white and red, suspended mid-air against a cloudless, intensely blue sky. The plane, occupying a third of the photo, is at the very centre of the image; its nose, slightly raised, points toward the picture’s right-hand edge. 

It was not unusual for JD to send a postcard without a written message, though on other occasions a substantial missive, inscribed in a tiny, difficult script, might occupy all the available space. A third kind of JD postcard contained but a single phrase such as “Brighton is sunny” – these words were jotted down on a Brighton Marina postcard of “Dolphins at play”, again in 1981. Another group of cards might be described as “pseudo-conceptual”, having no picture and containing only an isolated remark. Such texts, whether handwritten or typed, were placed on the other side to the address and stamp, the support being either a standard blank postcard, as with “Thinking a view……”, sent in 1980, or a plain French fiche. The postcard with the typed instruction “Take a card, any card,”, mailed from Shetland two weeks after the Trislander image, was, as with many of JD’s communications, consciously ironic, quoting the phrase used by stage magicians when inviting audience participation. It also referred to our shared interest in endless note-taking, varieties of stationery, and chance.  

… a single passenger, who appears to stare straight into the camera.

An even earlier JD postcard than that of the Loganair shuttle, bearing a reproduction of a 1975 painting by Tom Phillips entitled, but without the required question mark, “COULD THIS BE THE DAY”, and posted to me in an envelope in the late 1970s, bore the cryptic inscription “Crayon yourself.” This was the period of Punk and we were still at school, both of which factors inevitably had some bearing on the use of this playful, Dada-inflected prose.

On Monday, 1st December, 1986, JD unexpectedly disappeared. The police, contacted that evening when he failed to return home, could find no trace of him; nor was he ever seen or heard of again.  

The picture of the Trislander has something strange about it, as though a scale model had been photographed in place of the actual plane. Since its landing gear is clearly visible the aircraft has either recently taken off or is about to land, and one can just make out, sitting directly behind the pilot, a single passenger, who appears to stare straight into the camera. A few weeks ago, as I casually perused the postcard, which was at that moment propped up on a shelf several feet away from my desk, I was struck by a curious thought. The snapped Trislander did not so much look as if it was moving forward but rather – and notwithstanding the static nature of photography – as if the vehicle depicted was itself already immobile, the bright little craft frozen in progress, left hanging in the air. This impossible condition exactly parallels JD’s mysterious fate.     

The reverse of the postcard addressed to author with no message.

Text © Peter Suchin, 2020