I’m interested in things that are big, complicated, expensive, important, and, for most people, most of the time, really boring, until and unless they don’t work well or fail entirely.

Today’s #stampoftheday offering – 3 and 8 cent stamps issued by the United Nations Postal Administration on February 8, 1955 – speak to that interest because the two stamps honor the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). A specialized agency that is part of the UN (but whose historic roots predate the UN by over four decades), ICAO sets standards and recommends practices for all aspects of international aviation including air traffic control systems, flight inspection, air accident investigations and many other things.

Back in the “before times” when I travelled, I usually didn’t think about how an airplane could move (seemingly seamlessly) through airspace controlled by several different countries and that, for the most part, it was relatively easy to figure out what I needed to do when I arrived in – or left – a host of different countries. That’s not to say I didn’t have travel problems but, for the most part, things worked, apparently, in part because of entities like ICAO.

My interest in how entities like ICAO work, and how challenging issues are addressed, was fostered in the by the year I spent as a reporter for the Middlesex News, a mid-sized daily newspaper based in Framingham. Ken Hartnett, a legendary Boston-area newsman, had become its editor and he hired me to “go to Boston and write stories that would interest people in MetroWest.” (Ken, by the way, is the author of a wonderful “A Saving Grace,” a fun and often overlooked novel about Boston politics and journalism in the late 70s and early 80s).

I could have taken Ken’s charge in many directions. I remember Ken saying, for example, that perhaps, I might write about things like how kids got to be part of the Boston Ballet’s annual production of the Nutcracker. But given my interest in public policy and politics, I began to focus not on the State House (where we had another terrific reporter) but instead on a set of important and largely ignored regional issues and initiatives.

This was the time that Boston’s Big Dig, the nation’s most expensive and complicated urban highway project was taking shape. It’s also when the Boston Harbor clean-up project started in earnest and when the city of Boston was pioneering new approaches to development that tried to ensure that the city’s neighborhoods and residents benefitted from new downtown office development.

These were particularly interesting efforts because, as I’ve often said, they were led by talented and principled people -Fred Salvucci, Paul Levy, and Steve Coyle, respectively – who, as I’ve often said, “were trying to do things that couldn’t be done in ways that had never been done before.” Unlike their predecessors, who regularly destroyed whole neighborhoods in the name of progress until politics and policies changed and made such approaches nearly impossible, Salvucci, Levy, and Coyle were trying to build major projects in ways that didn’t harm – and arguably even helped – residents who previously would have been displaced or otherwise damaged.

These efforts changed the face of greater Boston. And the resulting projects aren’t without their flaws. The Big Dig was amazingly expensive and suffered from a variety of engineering problems, including a persistent problem of leaks. But focusing too much on those problems obscures the projects’ many positive attributes.

I think the image on today’s stamp, which was designed by Angel Medina Medina, an artist based in Uruguay, captures some of the spirit of those projects. The flying wing in the foreground, the UN explained when the stamp was issued, represents the spirit of flight. The world map in the background suggests how flight, and entities like ICAO unite and bring us together.

That’s not to say all is sunshine and roses at ICAO or aviation, which has been decimated by the pandemic. As Luis Felipe de Oliveira, who heads Airports Council International (ACI), which represents major airport operators, said ; the annual World Economic Forum in late January: “Millions of jobs are at risk, the economic downturn is at risk of getting worse…The industry lost USD112 billion last year and we lost 65 percent of expected global passenger traffic. International traffic is not expected to recover before 2024 and 2025 (in some markets later than this). There are some good developments in domestic markets with some recovery, but international traffic is still at a standstill.”

“Aviation is a global business”, he added, “and we need to have a global perspective.”

But, noted the Centre for Aviation (CAPA), a research arm of Aviation Week, an industry news source, for the most part, aviation related discussions at Davos didn’t address these concerns. Instead, CAPA noted, the formal session on aviation, which included the head of ICAO, was dominated by discussion about “the transition towards a decarbonized ‘net zero emission’ future and how in a ‘post-COVID’ world (is anyone able to say for sure when that will be, even if it will be?) potential structural changes ahead could result in different aviation business models, platforms, and diversified products and services being needed to meet the expectations of post-pandemic leisure and business travelers in the ‘new normal.” But, the write-up added, there was “nothing about what to do to tackle the crisis in the industry right now, while the pandemic rages threatening tens of millions of jobs in transport and tourism.”

I have no idea whether the criticism is fair. But I do note that it’s another example of a big, important, complicated, expensive and important issue that doesn’t get the attention it deserves until there’s a crisis – the kind of issue that today’s stamp honors.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.