Atlantic (38 page)

The dashing aviators—Jack Alcock in a blue serge suit and Brown in his Royal Flying Corps uniform, with 865 gallons of fuel and a pair of small black cats named Twinkletoes and Lucky Jim—set off on the morning of Saturday, June 14. They had horrendous problems—up at twelve thousand feet their instruments froze solid, their radio broke, their exhaust pipe ruptured, Brown had to climb onto the wings to break off ice,
⁷⁴
they became disoriented trying to watch the stately heeling of the stars in order to navigate, and went into a spin down through the clouds until almost hitting the waves—and when they finally arrived over the coast of Ireland, they could not find a place sufficiently free of rocks on which to land. Finally they spotted the masts of a radio station, circled it a number of times without at first managing to wake anyone—it was 8
A.M.
on an Irish Sunday, and the aftereffects of Guinness must have trumped the callings of piety—and settled the plane onto a field, crash-landed, and ended up nose down in soggy black peat.

They were in County Galway, near a hamlet of Clifden. When the radiomen awoke and realized who the two fliers were, they telegraphed news of their achievement to London. The pair became rich and famous overnight and were knighted by the king only weeks later. Sir John Alcock was killed in a flying accident just a year afterward, and Sir Arthur Whitten Brown lived until 1948. They had crossed the ocean, without stopping, and they had done it in sixteen hours and twenty-seven minutes. When the much more showy and popular Charles Lindbergh single-handedly flew the
Spirit of St. Louis
from Long Island to Le Bourget in 1927, he gave due credit to the pair: Alcock and Brown, he said, had showed him the way. Amy Johnson and Beryl Markham, who in the 1930s separately became the first of their sex to fly the same ocean westward, were not so generous.

The ocean is officially described by the two air traffic control centers that have charge of North Atlantic airspace as a region “moderately hostile to civilian air traffic”—it is vast, there are no navigation aids and no communication relays. This means that for a substantial portion of the journey over the ocean a civilian transport aircraft is essentially all on its own. If it gets into trouble out in mid-sea, then it is in big trouble indeed. Such realizations have a way of inducing real awe among those whose task it is to ferry people and goods across. What might appear to a safely arrived passenger as no more than quotidian routine is in fact the result of planning sessions no less intense than for a truly white-knuckled adventure, like rounding Cape Horn or scaling Mount Everest’s South Col.

More than 400,000 commercial jets cross the Atlantic Ocean each year, as this electronic map of the
air routes shows
. Fair amounts of traffic pass between Europe and its former South American possessions, but between the United States’ East Coast and Britain and mainland Europe, it is as though a solid bridge has been constructed, three thousand miles long.

The flight I chose to examine was one on which I was traveling home, on January 30, 2009: BA 113, an ordinary, mid-afternoon, no-excitement Boeing 777 journeyman’s flight, leaving London at 3:15
P.M.
and due to arrive at Kennedy Airport seven and a quarter hours later, at about 5:30
P.M.
local time. The aircraft would be parked on Stand 555, it would be tail number G-YMMO, a two-year-old 777-300ER, an extended-range version of Boeing’s highly regarded wide-bodied long-haul plane, equipped with Rolls-Royce Trent engines. It had just come in from Singapore and had recently performed runs to Toronto and Sydney. It was a workhorse, heavily employed on long-haul flights, and was well accustomed to flying the Atlantic.

(There were just two unusual items on this otherwise routine January day. The first was that overnight a northbound flight from Johannesburg had suffered a serious mechanical failure over Spain and had been forced to put down in Madrid. The London staff was now scrambling to send a replacement aircraft down to collect not just the stranded passengers, but also an enormous cargo of gold, something apparently quite normal on Johannesburg departures. The Madrid airport police were creating quite a fuss, however, aware that many millions of dollars’ worth of bullion would be most tempting for Spanish desperadoes if word got out. And with a cell phone in every passenger’s hands, it was unlikely to be a secret for long.

The other oddity was the interim report, just out, on G-YMMO’s slightly older sister aircraft, G-YMMM, which had crashed on its approach to Heathrow almost exactly a year before. There was still some puzzlement over why its engines seemed suddenly starved of fuel, and the plane “just dropped,” as the pilot put it, when it was coming in to land. The staff at the center were eager to assure me that even though the precise reasons for the accident hadn’t been worked out—most likely ice in a fuel line, accumulated while flying over a patch of unusually cold air over the Urals—it was statistically most unlikely to happen again.)

Eighteen pages of briefing notes were handed to the captain when he and his crew checked in three hours before his aircraft’s departure. The departure and arrival airports were all running normally—a scattering of lights were missing from a taxiway at Heathrow, there was construction at the end of a runway at Kennedy, nothing major. Much the same was true at the alternate arrival airports, Philadelphia, Boston, and Newark, though there were some minor navigation problems for aircraft going into Boston. As far as alternate airports en route—hooligans with laser lights were occasionally causing a nuisance by pointing them at incoming planes at Birmingham and Cardiff, there was severe wind shear and turbulence on approach to St. John’s, and a strike by workers at Goose Bay, Labrador, meant that the snow had not been fully cleared from the runway, causing that particular field to be closed.

The weather during the crossing was likely to be as cooperative as expected in late January: strong southerly high-level winds at the takeoff site and until five hundred miles off the Irish coast—then clouds would set in, the winds would drop and veer to the west for most of the track, then would go back to southwesterly and freshen over Newfoundland, and then return to strong westerlies for the approaches into New York. Turbulence would be minimal; storms were unreported.

One aspect of the flight that had been already decreed by air traffic control and the planners at the airline was the transatlantic track that BA 113 should use that day. There are generally ten tracks laid out each day, five of them westbound and five eastbound—each carefully designated lanes of traffic traversing the broad width of the deep Atlantic, away from the coasts of Europe and North America, and which are shifted very slightly north and south every few hours according to the exact current position of the jet stream, and which allow the huge number of aircraft crossing the ocean to be separated safely from one another.

The westbound tracks are designated A, B, C, D, and E, and the eastbound V, W, X, Y, Z. The six hundred or so planes that head west each day—BA 113 being one of them—fly at even-numbered altitudes, separated by 2,000 feet: at 40,000 feet, 38,000 feet, 36,000, and so on. Eastbound craft operate conversely at odd-numbered levels—39,000 feet, 37,000, down to 31,000. On this day my BA 113—its call sign on the radio
Speedbird 113
—had been told to fly on Track NAT Charlie, at Flight Level 380. She would prepare to enter the critical transoceanic sector at an invisible waypoint that Atlantic aviation chartmakers had given the unlovely name of BURAK. She would make her actual entrance into the oceanic sector, sashaying elegantly into the most critical portion of the flight, at a second waypoint designated as MALOT.
⁷⁵

The two bodies that police the ocean at high altitude and try to maintain good order and safety for the aircraft and their thousands of daily passengers are based in Prestwick in Scotland and in Gander in Newfoundland. The first, the Shanwick Oceanic Control Centre, is an enormous complex of buildings—appropriately known as Atlantic House—situated on public housing land south of the main runways at Prestwick Airport. It has control—by way of an immensely powerful shortwave radio station sited far away in the village of Ballygirreen in southwest Ireland—over all aircraft coming to and going from the British Isles as they pass across a vast swathe of sea that extends from Icelandic waters in the north to the Bay of Biscay in the south, and onward to a line halfway across the ocean at 30 degrees west longitude.

Shanwick is usually an intense and busy place, as one might expect. But for periods in the late spring of 2010 a bizarre and eerie quiet fell on the main control room. High-altitude clouds of volcanic dust from Iceland were found to be wafting across northern Europe, and cautious bureaucrats in Brussels decided to ground most European flights and to ban nearly all air traffic across the north Atlantic. Their decision, much criticized, left millions of passengers stranded around the world, and the Shanwick controllers with precious little to do.

Shanwick’s mirror opposite is across in Newfoundland: Gander Oceanic Control, by far the busiest oceanic control center in the world—its staff monitored no fewer than 414,000 crossings in 2007—handles all deep ocean traffic that passes to the west of the same thirty-degree longitude line. While Prestwick’s center is located in a homely Scottish suburb, Gander occupies a series of low and unlovely structures beside a lonely former military staging post airfield among the pine trees and swamps of northeastern Newfoundland, and is remote in the extreme. Yet Gander airfield has a uniqueness beyond being far away: it is also an airport open continually, without any time or noise restriction—“A curfew, up here? You’ve got to be joking!”—and the airfield prides itself on being what it calls the “airlines’ lifeboat,” a sanctuary kept always stocked and ready on the davits for any kind of trouble that may occur in flight. “We can handle anything,” the managers say. “Mechanical, navigational, unruly passengers, bomb scares, hijacking, what have you. We’re trained, we’re prepared. Whatever the time, whatever the need, whatever the weather, we here at Gander can take care of it.”
⁷⁶

Speedbird 113 was due to spend about three hours of its transatlantic passage in the unreal world of the oceanic control sector, a place commanded by the ever-fading shortwave radio signals from Gander and Shanwick. To the passengers seated aft of the armored cockpit doors, the ocean below is a place of utter unremarkability—less a matter of space, more an expanse of time, a period of necessary tedium. It is a place and a time with no markers, no fixed waypoints—other than the invisible coordinates of latitude and longitude, which the commander up front would report by radio or by satellite data link to either Scotland or Canada as he flew along—with no landmarks, and with no visible means of support, other than the aerofoils and the constant low thunder of the twin Trent engines. If things went badly wrong here—if there was an engine fire, say, or a sudden loss of cabin pressure—the pilot could, for most of the journey across it, either turn back or make a turn for one of the two possible alternate airfields that were manageably close to his chosen route—in this case either Keflavik in Iceland or Narsarsuaq in southern Greenland.

That would be true only for
most of his journey
, that is. There is one relatively small sector of the transatlantic track—and which on this particular flight was designated as a line about five hundred miles long, an hour or so of flying between longitudes 25 degrees west and 44 degrees west—where it would be quite impractical to think of trying to make an alternate airport. Within this sector both Keflavik and Narsarsuaq would be more distant than the airports either behind or ahead on the destination continent. The only way out of a serious problem here would be to head straight on, to keep calm, appear unruffled, pray if so inclined, and hope. This few hundred miles is by far the most risky part of any North Atlantic transit—and for the pilots who cross it, it is the part where any disrespect and disdain for the ocean below fades away, where world-weariness becomes a secondary issue, and where awe for the vastness and unforgiving hostility of the sea beneath becomes a firm and intractable reality.

But as it happens—and mercifully it seldom happens otherwise—there was no problem whatsoever on my crossing that day. There had been little by way of turbulence or unanticipated diversion en route; the descent was as normal as the takeoff had been; the plane arrived in Kennedy Airport precisely on time; and when I mentioned to the pilot in the baggage area that I had been a little nervous crossing through the dead zone, as I called it, he laughed and said simply, it’s just the place where
we have to keep on our toes
.

2. FOULING THE NEST

Yet if we return to the original point—that the casual public acceptance of transoceanic air travel has dulled us to the wonders and the beauties and the preciousness of the seas below—it is not simply the pilots in flight who need to keep on their toes. The world at large is now having to keep super-aware of the implications of flight as well, and for an entirely different reason. Aircraft in flight are dirty and fuel-hungry monsters, and because there now are so very many of them—currently some twenty thousand big commercial jets, carrying 2,200 million passengers around the world (and 100 million of them across the Atlantic Ocean) each year—the damage they appear to be doing to the fragile shroud of the earth’s atmosphere, and by extension to the seas, is said by many students of the environment to be very grave indeed.