In a sign of its scale, the sculpture will be about six metres taller than the tail of an A380 superjumbo, the world’s largest passenger jet, which may one day touch down at the nearby airport.

On the morning of November 4th, 2010, 440 passengers and 29 crew boarded Qantas flight 32, at Singapore’s Changi airport. The aircraft they were flying on, a state-of-the-art Airbus A380, would go on ...