We are a family editorial team.
Our editors live and work in Poland, the United Kingdom and the USA. What connects us is paying close attention to the world at a time when it changes faster than we can describe it.
We observe. We share what we know. We write with no agenda and no ads, because this blog was never about making money. It is about understanding.
How it all began. Flight LO 136
It all began with my Mum. She was a pilot with the Aeroklub Polski, and in communist Poland, as the family whispered, pilots got some kind of discount on LOT. Nobody knew exactly what kind. Nobody was going to ask too loudly, either.
The plan was simple and very Polish. A summer holiday in Zakopane, at the foot of Nosal, a train, a suitcase and sandwiches wrapped in newspaper. And then came the surprise that switched every track in my head. We were flying!
Flight LO 136, six in the morning, an Antonov An-24. Two propellers, a roar no school bell could ever drown out, and me with my nose pressed to the glass. Poznań to Warsaw, Warsaw to Kraków. And then, because we did have to come back, the same again the other way. Four take-offs and four landings. For a boy who until then had only seen planes in the sky above Ławica, it was a world record.
After the summer I went back to school as the only one in my class, and maybe in the whole neighbourhood, who was already on first-name terms with LOT. I talked about it for so long that my classmates knew the details of the flight better than their times tables.
Several decades have passed since then, and I have lost count of the flights. Planes are bigger, sandwiches pricier, and there are still too few window seats. But every journey we write about on this blog begins, in a way, right there, at six in the morning, in an Antonov, with a nose against the glass.
That is why our boarding pass always keeps seat 1A free. By the window.
