Wu Wei at Thirty Thousand Feet

● Part Two of AirBorneo Lore:

An ongoing journal and introspective series

Imagine this scene:

The viewing deck at Kuching airport on a Saturday morning. A boy of about six counts the aeroplanes as they leave.

He reaches four, then turns to the dozen parked on the far side of the apron and smiles, because he has just counted the first law of any airline: the planes that fly and the planes that sit.

His grandmother, who has crossed more rivers by boat than skies by air, tells him the number doesn’t matter. What matters is whether they come back.

She has stumbled on the oldest rule in transport, and aviation has spent a century forgetting it. Beyond the apron, the brown river keeps its own schedule, as it did long before anyone poured a runway.

Today, the average traveller weighs an airline on a mix of things, and two are plain to see: punctuality and affordability. The third, size, stays invisible until it fails.

So let me take you up to thirty thousand feet, where the numbers get honest.

The Size of the Water

Air travel worships growth. India’s IndiGo flies 432 aircraft and plans more than 600 by 2030. In 2025, Qantas closed Jetstar Asia, 13 aircraft beaten by rising costs and fierce competition.

Same sky, opposite lesson: an airline can be punctual, well loved and well run, and still be the wrong size for the water it swims in.

Growth is the religion of the sky, and like every religion it has its heretics: the few who dare to ask how much is enough?

Sarawak is now deciding how big its own airline should be. AirBorneo plans 17 jets by 2030.

The airport they will fly from handled 5.76 million passengers last year, through a terminal designed for five. The ambition is plain. The question is pace.

Three Words for One River

The Daoists have a word for pace: wu wei, “non-forcing.” It is what a good boatman does: read the current, then use it. He is fast because he does not push.

Aristotle reached the same place by another road and called it phronesis, practical wisdom: the ability to see what this moment, this ground and this load actually ask of you. It is the virtue that separates ambition from appetite.

In Islam, there is Al-Mīzān, an Arabic word that translates directly as balance, or scales.

An airline needs all three. Wu wei says grow at the speed the road allows. Phronesis says know what the road is. Mīzān says weigh what you are carrying.

For AirBorneo, the road is a short list of honest numbers: how many seats the market will fill, how many gates the airport can hold, how many promises a turboprop can keep before breakfast.

What I Know, and What I Don’t

I once worked inside a low-cost carrier. The world’s best, every year during that period, of course. I know how seductive the next aircraft is.

I have felt that pull in my own palm. Every ledger whispers more, until the day it says too much. That day arrives quietly, in a spreadsheet, never on a runway.

There is a second thing I know, because I am from here. Sarawak has an old, gentle habit of reading timetables drawn somewhere else.

For years our flights left on schedules written across the sea, under names that were never quite ours.

Now the livery says Borneo, and the first jets fly on loan: the wings are borrowed, the route is ours. There is a poem in that, and I would rather leave it a poem than turn it into a complaint.

Departure Gate, October 2037

Everything in this section is invention, not prediction. The fleet numbers are my own sums, not the airline’s.

Where I come from, the river was the first airline: routes before roads, a timetable written by tides.

On the Batang Lupar they still speak of the benak, the tidal bore that rolls upriver like a moving wall. No boatman fights it. He reads it, and moves with it, or he waits.

Now carry that river forward eleven years. It is October 2037. The boy from the viewing deck is seventeen, wearing a trainee’s badge, and he no longer counts aeroplanes aloud.

He reads them. The board above Gate 4 shows the fleet: thirty-two jets and twenty turboprops, based at Kuching, Miri and Kota Kinabalu.

The airline passed two dozen jets in 2030, beating its own plan of seventeen.

My sums, not the airline’s: thirty-two jets of 162 seats, flying 4.5 sectors a day at 80 per cent full, would carry about 6.8 million passengers a year.

No single terminal could hold that, which is why there are three bases. So how big is big enough?

The sky runs on quieter machinery now. Engines report their own fatigue weeks before it matters.

A delay is settled by software before it becomes a queue. Humanoid assistants lift the bags, steady the elderly, and read a boarding card aloud in Iban, Bidayuh, Malay, Mandarin or Hokkien, whichever you answer to.

The phone has mostly dissolved into a watch, a pair of glasses and, for the willing, a neural pass that opens the gate before you reach it, under a data law that arrived first, to Sarawak’s credit.

And the ATRs still go to Bario, on time.

His grandmother takes the stairs. The humanoid follows one step behind, hand open, never gripping. She carries a paper boarding card, the old kind: one small thing kept in her own hand.

End of imagined section.

The Prize Is Boring

So the wise strategy isn’t the biggest. It is the one that survives an ordinary Tuesday: a fare that holds, an ATR that leaves on time for a village with no road, a policy that protects the passenger before any technology starts reading them.

These are boring virtues. They are also the ones legacies are made of.

If we get this right, the boy will stop counting. The number will no longer matter, because coming back will have become ordinary. His grandmother said it first, on the deck: what matters is whether they come back.

This Week’s Practice

Choose one commitment you have made publicly, to a team, a family, a customer. Write down what keeping it costs each week, and who actually pays.

If you can name the payer, you have a promise. If you can’t, you have a wish.

Then do one small, unglamorous thing this week that keeps it. Like the boatman, move with the grain of the river.

The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.