Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (2 page)

My mother, born under the quieter skies of rural Pennsylvania, worked as a speech therapist and had no particular interest in aviation. Yet I feel she was the one who best understood my attachment to the less tangible joys of flight: the old romance of all journeys, which she gave to my brother and me in the form of stories like
Stuart Little
and
The Hobbit,
but also a sense of what we see from above or far away—the gift, the destination, that flying makes not of a distant place but of our home. Her favorite hymn was “For the Beauty of the Earth,” a title, at least, that we agreed might be worth printing on the inside of airplane window blinds.

My brother is not a pilot. His love is not for airplanes but for bicycles. His basement is full of bikes that are works in progress, that he’s designing and assembling from far-gathered parts, for me or for a grateful friend. When it comes to his bike frames, he is as obsessed with lightness as any aeronautical engineer. He likes to make and fix bikes even more than he likes to ride them, I think.

If I see my brother working on one of his two-wheeled creations, or notice that he’s reading about bikes on his computer while I am next to him on the couch reading about airplanes, I may remember that the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics, and that their skyfaring skills began with wheels, a heritage that suddenly becomes clear when you look again at their early airplanes. When I see pictures of such planes I think, if I had to assemble anything that looked like this, I would start by calling on the skills of my brother—even though there was the time I got him in trouble with our parents for skipping his chores, and so he taped firecrackers to one of my model airplanes and lit the fuses and waited just the right number of seconds before throwing the model from an upstairs window, in a long arc over the backyard.

As a teenager I took a few flying lessons. I thought that I might one day fly small airplanes as a hobby, on weekend mornings, an aside to some other career. But I don’t remember having a clear wish to become an airline pilot. No one at school suggested the career to me. No pilots lived in our neighborhood; I don’t know if there were any commercial pilots at all in our small town in western Massachusetts, which was some distance from any major airport. My dad was an example of someone who enjoyed airplanes whenever he encountered them, but who had decided not to make them his life’s work. I think the main reason I didn’t decide earlier to become a pilot, though, is because I believed that something I wanted so much could never be practical, almost by definition.

In high school I spent my earnings from a paper route and restaurant jobs on summer homestay programs abroad, in Japan and Mexico. After high school I stayed in New England for college but also studied in Belgium, briefly reversing the journey my father had made. After college I went to Britain to study African history, so that I could live in Britain and, I hoped, in Kenya. I left that degree program when I finally realized that I wanted to become a pilot. To repay my student loans and save the money I expected to need for flight training, I took a job in Boston, in the field—management consulting—that I thought would require me to fly most often.

In high school I certainly wanted to see Japan and Mexico, and to study Japanese and Spanish. But really, what attracted me most to such adventures was the scale of the airplane journeys they required. It was the possibility of flight that most drew me to far-off summer travels, to degree programs in two distant lands, to the start of the most literally high-flying career I could find in the business world, and at last—because none of even those endeavors got me airborne nearly often enough—to a career as a pilot.

When I was ready to start my flight training, I decided to return to Britain. I liked many aspects of the country’s historic relationship with aviation, its deep tradition of air links with the whole world, and the fact that even some of the shortest flights from Britain are to places so very different from it. And, not least, I liked the idea of living near the good friends I’d made as a postgraduate there.

I began to fly commercially when I was twenty-nine. I first flew the Airbus A320 series airliners, a family of narrow-bodied jets used on short- to medium-distance flights, on routes all around Europe. I’d be woken by an alarm in the 4 a.m. darkness of Helsinki or Warsaw or Bucharest or Istanbul, and there would be a brief bleary moment, in the hotel room whose shape and layout I’d already forgotten in the hours since I’d switched off the light, when I’d ask myself if I’d only been dreaming that I became a pilot. Then I would imagine the day of flying ahead, crossing back and forth in the skies of Europe, almost as excitedly as if it was my first day. I now fly a larger airplane, the Boeing 747. On longer flights we carry additional pilots so that each of us can take a legally prescribed break, a time to sleep and dream, perhaps, while Kazakhstan or Brazil or the Sahara rolls steadily under the line of the wing.

Frequent travelers, in the first hours or days of a trip, may be familiar with the experience of jet lag or a hotel wake-up call summoning them from the heart of night journeys they would otherwise have forgotten. Pilots are often woken at unusual points in their sleep cycles and perhaps, too, the anonymity and nearly perfect darkness of the pilot’s bunk form a particularly clean slate for imagination. Whatever the reason, I now associate going to work with dreaming, or at least, with dreams recalled only because I am in the sky.

—

A chime sounds in the darkness of the 747’s bunk. My break is over. I feel for the switch that turns on a pale-yellow beam. I change into my uniform, which has been hanging on a plastic peg for something like 2,000 miles. I open the door that leads from the bunk to the cockpit. Even when I know it’s coming—and it’s frequently hard to know, depending as it does on the season, the route, the time, and the place—the brightness always catches me off guard. The cockpit beyond the bunk is blasted with a directionless daylight so pure and overwhelming, so alien to the darkness I left it in hours ago and to the gloom of the bunk, that it is like a new sense.

As my eyes adjust, I look forward through the cockpit windows. At this moment it’s the light itself, rather than what it falls upon, that is the essential feature of the earth. What the light falls upon is the Sea of Japan, and far across this water, on the snowcapped peaks of the island nation we are approaching. The blueness of the sea is as perfect as the sky it reflects. It is as if we are slowly descending over the surface of a blue star, as if all other blues are to be mined or diluted from this one.

As I move forward in the cockpit to my seat on the right side of it, I think briefly back to the trip I made to Japan as a teenager, about two decades ago, and to the city this plane left only yesterday, though
yesterday
isn’t quite the right word for what preceded a night that hardly deserves the name, so quickly was it undone by our high latitudes and eastward speed.

I remember that I had an ordinary morning in the city. I went to the airport in the afternoon. Now that day has turned away into the past, and the city, London, lies well beyond the curve of the planet.

As I fasten my seat belt I remember how we started the engines yesterday. How the sudden and auspicious hush fell in the cockpit as the airflow for the air-conditioning units was diverted; how air alone began to spin the enormous techno-petals of the fans, spin them and spin them, faster and faster, until fuel and fire were added, and each engine woke with a low rumble that grew to a smooth and unmistakable roar—the signature of one of our age’s most perfect means of purifying and directing physical power.

In legal terms a journey begins when “an aircraft moves under its own power for the purpose of flight.” I remember the aircraft that moved ahead of us for this purpose and lifted ahead of us into the London rain. As that preceding aircraft taxied into position its engines launched rippling gales that raced visibly over the wet runway, as if from some greatly speeded-up video recording of the windswept surface of a pond. When
takeoff thrust
was
set
the engines heaved this water up in huge gusting night-gray cones, new clouds cast briefly skyward.

I remember our own takeoff roll, an experience that repetition hasn’t dulled: the unfurling carpet of guiding lights that say
here,
the voice of the controller that says
now;
the sense, in the first seconds after the engines reach their assigned power and we begin to roll forward, that this is only a curious kind of driving down an equally curious road. But with speed comes the transition, the gathering sense that the wheels matter less, and the mechanisms that work on the air—the
control surfaces
on the wings and the tail—more. We feel the airplane’s dawning life in the air clearly through the controls, and with each passing second the jet’s presence on the ground becomes more incidental to how we direct its motion. Yesterday we were flying on the earth, long before we left it.

On every takeoff there is a speed known as
V1.
Before this speed we have enough room left ahead of us on the runway to stop the takeoff. After this speed we may not. Thus committed to flight, we continued for some time along the ground, gathering still more speed to the vessel. A few long seconds after V1 the jet reached its next milestone of velocity and the captain called: “Rotate.” As the lights of the runway started to alternate red and white to indicate its approaching end, as the four rivers of power that summed to nearly a quarter of a million pounds of thrust unfurled over the runway behind us, I lifted the nose.

As if we had only pulled out of a driveway, I turned right, toward Tokyo.

London, then, was on my side of the cockpit. The city grew bigger before it became smaller. From above, still climbing, you realize that this is how a city becomes its own map, how a place becomes whole before your eyes, how from an airplane the idea of a city and the image of a city itself can overlay each other so perfectly that it’s no longer possible to distinguish between them. We followed London’s river, that led the vessels of a former age from their docks to the world, as far as the North Sea. Then the sea turned, and Denmark, Sweden, Finland passed beneath us, and night fell—the night that both began and ended over Russia. Now I’m in the new day’s blue northwest of Japan, waiting for Tokyo to rise as simply as the morning.

I settle myself into my sheepskin-covered seat and my particular position above the planet. I blink in the sun, check the distance of my hands and feet from the controls, put on a headset, adjust the microphone. I say good morning to my colleagues, in the half-ironic sense that long-haul pilots will know well, that means, on a light-scrambling journey, I need a minute to be sure where it is morning, and for whom—whether for me, or the passengers, or the place below us on the earth, or perhaps at our destination. I ask for a cup of tea. My colleagues update me on the hours I was absent; I check the computers, the fuel gauges. Small, steady green digits show our expected landing time in Tokyo, about an hour from now. This is expressed in Greenwich Mean Time. In Greenwich it is still yesterday. Another display shows the remaining nautical miles of flight, a number that drops about one mile every seven seconds. It is counting down to the largest city that has ever existed.

I am occasionally asked if I don’t find it boring, to be in the cockpit for so many hours. The truth is I have never been bored. I’ve sometimes been tired, and often I’ve wished I were heading home, rather than moving away from home just about as quickly as it is possible to do so. But I’ve never had the sense that there was any more enjoyable way to spend my working life, that below me existed some other kind of time for which I would trade my hours in the sky.

Most pilots love their work and have wanted to do it for as long as they can remember. Many began their training as soon as they could, often in the military. But when I started my training course in Britain, I was surprised at how many of my fellow trainees had traveled quite far down another path—they were medical students, pharmacists and engineers, who, like me, had decided to return to their first love. For me, coming later to the profession has been an opportunity to think about why many of my colleagues and I were drawn back so strongly to a half-forgotten notion, one that we shared as children.

Some pilots enjoy the hand-to-eye mechanics that are related to movement in three dimensions, particularly the challenges that cluster at the beginning and end of every flight. Others have a natural affinity for machines, and airplanes are engineered nobility, lying well beyond most cars, boats, and motorcycles on the continuum of our shiny creations.

Many pilots, I think, are especially drawn to the freedom of flight. A jet is detached, physically remote and separate for a certain number of miles and hours. Such solitude is all but absent from the world now, and so—paradoxically, for in the cockpit we could hardly be better encased in technology—flight feels increasingly old-fashioned. Paired with this freedom is the opportunity to come to know the cities of the world well and to see so much of the land, water, and air that lie between them.

Then, too, there is the perennial yearning for height that many of us share. High places have gravity. They pull us up. Elevation remains simple, a prime number, an element on the periodic table. “Higher, Orville, higher!” cried the father of the Wright brothers, when he made his first flight at the age of eighty-one. We build skyscrapers and visit their observation decks; we ask for an upper floor in a hotel; we ponder photographs taken from high above our homes, our towns, our planet with a mix of love and bewildered recognition; we climb mountains and try if we can to save our sandwich for the summit. On my first morning in a new city I’ll often go first to a viewing point on top of a tall building, where I occasionally see travelers whom I recognize from my flight.

Perhaps evolution alone explains the attraction of altitude. Here is the big picture, the survey, the overview, the lookout, the lay of our land, what approaches our cave or castle. Strabo, the Greek geographer who would partly inspire Columbus, climbed the acropolis of Corinth merely to gain perspective on the city. When my father arrived to work as a missionary in a poor neighborhood of the Brazilian metropolis of Salvador, his first step was to hire a pilot to help him photograph the unmapped neighborhood and its informal, largely unnamed streets. Many years later, after he died, my brother and I heard a rumor that a street in this locality had been named for him after he left Brazil. We pored over a map of the city on a laptop to find Rua Padre José Henrique, Father Joseph Henry Street; we zoomed in from the digital sky, from four decades and many thousands of miles away, to remember the story of his first flight over this city.