Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (23 page)

When there is no wind, the contrails stay in their appointed positions for some time, and so on a busy air route we occasionally see a stack of contrails, as neatly arranged as the lines of a pole fence. On a moonlit night, if there is only one above and one below, running off to the horizon to where each ghostly fog-line is headed by the glow of a distant plane, then it’s as if the lights and the path of one craft are only the reflection of the other’s.

—

I’m often disappointed when I arrive over a region of grand scenery—the American Southwest, Greenland, Iran—or any place I have not seen before, and find the world cloaked, or when the world below is cloudy for an entire flight. Such days, however, are a reminder that overcast days are not sealed off but divided. Regular flyers and even pilots may forget that to cross this division effortlessly, to sail into the upper hemisphere of our hours, is a new realm of experience. From the grayest of mornings, from the dullest of meetings and the longest of lines at the post office, we climb into the light-filled clerestory of the world.

If the plane is heavy and climbing slowly, or the cloud deck is ill defined, then the jet rises from the white as if lifted by some slow, innate buoyancy. The transition to the upper regions of the day is gradual. If, on the other hand, the plane is climbing quickly, and the tops are sharply defined, then the plane launches itself into the sky like a kickboard that a swimmer has forced underwater; when it is let go and breaks the surface. Clouds are associated with disturbances and risings in the air; and so rising out of the clouds often means soaring out of turbulence, too, into a sky that is both clear and smooth; a sky that is clear because it is smooth.

There’s a direct analogy between the career of a pilot and every flight that takes place on an overcast day. When you first learn to fly, you avoid the clouds. Later, you learn to use instruments to fly through them, and later still you may fly airliners that soar above them almost always. I remember clearly, then, the start of my instrument flight training. It was the first day I was permitted to fly through clouds, instead of air-skiing around them or remaining on the ground. It was also the first day I shared a radio frequency with actual airliners arriving in the skies of southeast England from all around the world; the first time I called “London Control.”

It’s surprising how many layers of cloud can lie over each other and the world, each with its own hues and personality of light; we climb from one to another of them as if rising through the storys, each so marvelously different, of a building cast of mist. Higher layers may be thin, even transparent, and we can often look through one layer of cloud at another beneath it. A high, thin layer of racing cloud has the organic and mathematical look of sand drifting across a hard-packed beach, or snow caught in the headlights of a car, blowing low over the dark road surface. At different heights such sheets appear to move at different speeds—world-scaled panels of water, sliding across each other, each as big as the sky.

The lowest of these surfaces may be the ocean itself, cut perhaps with the sharp angles of icebergs floating beneath a stack of mist-rounded insubstantialities. Like so many wonders from the window seat, such a sight feels both abstracted and true; there’s no difference between how we might imagine such a scene and what we actually see.

Imagine the loveliest red sunset, and place it above the grayest of days, where we forget it so often is. Sometimes at dusk, climbing up through such layers of cloud, the plane emerges from the monochromatic low world into a dizzyingly smooth vault of nearly horizontal red light. As we rise in the sky it’s as if the global circuit breaker for color had been tripped but has now been reset, as if this red is its own kind of cloud, yet another state of water, that we discovered in the heavens. The crimson cloud surfaces can then take on the look of some interstitial volume of the body, the inner tissues of a world without scale.

Georgia O’Keeffe was afraid of flying but obsessed with the clouds she saw from airplanes, which she painted with an all but religious devotion: “When you fly under even normal circumstances, you see such marvelous things, such incredible colors that you actually begin to believe in your dreams.” I try to remember, when I haven’t flown for some time, and the handles of the bags of groceries that I’m carrying through a cold and rainy November dusk are about to break, that such a lake of light may be above the clouds that rest upon the street.

—

In the normal visual pace of descent and arrival, possibilities of place narrow as specificities multiply. What we might call the arrival effect happens in two senses: the vertical and the horizontal. Arriving over land, the world resolves itself vertically, because more of its detail is visible as we descend closer to it. At the same time, the space between cities is transforming horizontally. Wilderness distills to farms, farms into suburbs that are riven by main roads that lead to the city itself. These twinned accelerations, these parallel condensations of detail, are what it means to come to a city from the air.

Place lag occurs because our sense of where we are cannot travel as fast as the plane. The sight of an approaching city on a crystal-clear day can briefly mask place lag, because what is gradually happening in the window has its own visual flow, a progression of geographic logic that may give the illusion of sensibility or comprehension. But when place appears suddenly, only when the clouds at last part, then for once what happens to place before our eyes is aligned with what happens to it in our mind. The eye closed, and now it opens.

On that flight to an overcast Amsterdam, the first flight I took alone, I was disappointed to see so little from the window seat during the arrival. But the Holland that emerged so late in the window—the sea, the ships, the wind-lashed walkers on the beach, the wet lanes of the morning rush-hour traffic bending toward Amsterdam, the green fields, and the roof panels of the many greenhouses—held my imagination for a long time after the flight; much longer, perhaps, than it would have if the skies had been clear. I came to love this gift from the clouds: the experience of seeing so little for so long, until we see everything.

Some tropical cities, like Singapore, have been surrounded by great vertical extents of rising afternoon cloud every time I have flown to them. We descend into this world, we fly down and around these columns of vapor long before we ever see the city’s skyscrapers or runways, as if we must pass first through the gates and along the avenues of the cloud-city of Singapore before we reach the concrete metropolis that is carrying on beneath it.

In London, the proximity and typical weather of Heathrow mean that after hours of white and gray, often the first sight of the returning earth is the heart of the city that called us across the world, its wharves and new skyscrapers rising like great masts from the ordinary busy morning that waited beneath the clouds.

We take such navigation for granted, as if it’s nothing to us, to fly across the planet and then to approach the white-granite surface of the cloud world with the now ordinary intention of simply descending through it, to find all of London lying like pages of densely typeset newsprint spread upon a floor. The sky waters extinguished geography, perhaps for nearly the entire journey. Now they part and place arrives, not as the long-building and inevitable visual conclusion to a journey, but as if with the blinding, voltaic thump of light arrays high around a stadium: here is London, in the toll of its present hour.

—

Low-lying fog, seen from the ground beneath it, all but extinguishes the world. From above, however, fog can resemble little more than a veil of gauze drawn across the land, so low upon it, seemingly, that for someone on the ground to rise above it would be as simple as standing up.

Visibility measured along the runway is called
runway visual range.
You can see the
transmissometers
that measure this near runways; they look like two periscopes that have emerged from the earth, swiveled, and spotted each other and are now staring each other down. A landscape’s predilections for fog are an important consideration when choosing where to build an airport, and so transmissometers may be erected long before the airport itself. A captain once told me a rumor about the residents near such a potential new airport, who put garbage bags over the transmissometers, to conjure the illusion of dense fog at what, to distant engineers, must have suddenly seemed like the worst place in the world to site an airport.

Often when fog is causing delays that ripple throughout a day and across a continent, the sky above it is nevertheless perfectly clear. We prepare for a landing in fog while we are descending in clear and open sunlight. Only in the last seconds does the plane descend into the rolling waves of mist; the world and runway vanish as wholly as if someone has cast a gray sheet over the nose of the aircraft.

Sometimes the fog lies on a runway only in patches, and so we must evaluate multiple visibility reports from several different points along the runway before we decide to make an approach. Once I flew to Edinburgh and we landed in perfect sunshine. Then, a third of the way down the runway, we rolled into a total whiteout before, a thousand feet further, sailing back into bewildering billows of sunlight, an experience I otherwise associate with biking or driving across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Not long ago I approached London on a foggy autumn morning. A brighter lighting system had recently been installed on the southern runway we would shortly land on. The controllers directed us right over Heathrow, then east toward central London, before turning us back for our final approach. As I flew above the airport and banked overhead, I could see that the fog ran only in portions over this runway, in slow, wind-rolled breakers. It could have been a road through time, from a prehistoric moor to some future space age: one half of the runway was submerged in fog that blurred but did not entirely mask the lights beneath, while the other half was completely clear, its mathematical, illuminated patterns forming a dazzling welcome to the homeward-bound sky vessels.

Pre-dawn fog over the lights of a city itself is one of the most sublime things I have seen from an airplane. On such a morning the mist floats over the sprawling light-scape, piling thicker in some areas and thinning in others. The mist has the life of currents on a body of water or glaciers seen at high speed in their seasonal pulses over the land, water in slow motion, at perhaps its most archetypal and mysterious. Thinner fog can act on our vision like an out-of-focus lens, erasing the edges of even sharply demarcated light-structures. As roads blur into contrails of light and collections of houses spread like night flowers into the covering mist, the illuminations of an entire city can take on the quality of a string of Christmas bulbs on a bush covered in fresh snow.

When I took that examination flight at the end of my instrument training, I descended to an altitude where I had to decide whether I could see enough to land or whether to fly away from the runway. But the best-equipped airliners, flying to the best-equipped airports, offer another option on foggy days: an automatic landing. This is an extraordinary thing to see, because we see so little.

As we sail through the gray on an approach for an automatic landing, it is as if the volume of the world has been turned down. Partly it’s our concentration in the cockpit and partly it’s the peacefulness that many of us may associate with misty starts to autumn days. Such a sense of quiet is more than an impression—landing aircraft are more widely spaced in fog, so there may be fewer pilots speaking on each radio frequency. Foggy skies, too, are often nearly still, with little or none of the aerial terrain of bumps and turbulence that in higher clouds continually remind us that we are in the air. Often in a cockpit surrounded by fog there is no sense of motion at all, except in the turning of the altimeters. The feeling that fog can give, that the cockpit windows have been papered over in perfectly trimmed gray sheets, is one of the situations, unsurprisingly, for which a flight simulator prepares pilots most perfectly. Indeed, we may do more landings in dense fog in the simulator than in the actual aircraft, and so on the real world’s mistiest days it’s easy to forget that there isn’t an examiner sitting behind us with a notepad.

The aura of silence on fog-bound approaches leaves room for an aspect of our return to earth that is not apparent to passengers: the airplane’s own voices. The craft’s most prominent voice is that which announces the final heights as registered by the eyes of the radio altimeter, the device that bounces radio waves off whatever is directly below the plane. These
callouts
annunciate our growing proximity to the earth. There are no altitude callouts on departure, when we are going away from the ground.

When I flew the Airbus the first of these announcements heard on an approach, in a low male voice, was “TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED.” At the analogous point of flight in the 747, a female voice speaks the name of the device itself that has awoken to the radio-sight of the ground below: “RADIO ALTIMETER!” After the wake-up call the radio altimeter begins its formal countdown with something of the majesty that I associate with the announcers at a rocket launch. The increments grow smaller, and so the frequency of the callouts increases as we descend, a quickening pace that perfectly reflects the ever-closer planet. Next is “ONE THOUSAND,” followed by “FIVE HUNDRED.” “FIFTY.” “THIRTY.” “TWENTY.”…“TEN.” A moment later, touchdown.

In the midst of this countdown comes another important voice. That minimum altitude to which we can descend without sight of the runway or its lights is called the
decision altitude
or
decision height.
This vertical milestone is so important that as the plane nears it, it will announce “FIFTY ABOVE” in the cockpit. We are not 50 feet above the ground; we are 50 feet above our decision in the air. The next call is known as the
decide call.
“DE-CIDE,” says the 747 brightly but firmly. Can you see enough to land? “DECIDE” right now, choose between the earth and sky.