Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (37 page)

The translation of weight lifted to fuel consumed is meticulous. If you carry five extra books in your suitcase on a long flight, an additional amount of fuel, by some calculations roughly equivalent to the weight of one or two of the five books, will have to be burned to lift your reading matter across the world. Occasionally the number of passengers or the amount of cargo on a flight increases at the last minute. Then we may have to upload additional tons of fuel to cater to the increased payload.

This vicious cycle results even when the extra weight is itself fuel. Occasionally—perhaps because fog or snowfall are forecast at our destination—we load more fuel than the flight plan and our normal reserves would call for, to allow us to absorb the anticipated arrival delays. On a typical long-haul route, if we wish to allow for an additional thirty minutes’ holding time at our destination, we might load about forty minutes of fuel, to account for the significant portion of the extra fuel that will be burned merely to carry the remainder to the far side of the world. And the longer the flight, the more fuel is burned in this way, which means that at a certain point the fuel efficiencies of one long flight over two shorter ones start to fade.

Before I became a pilot, I never imagined that an awareness of the aircraft’s ever-changing weight would become as intuitive a part of the journey as the remaining minutes or miles of flight. This sense of the jet’s weight is an all but continuous reminder of the mechanics of flight; of the physical task of lifting people and cargo away from the ground and across the sky. The aircraft’s weight affects the altitudes and speeds we cruise at, and in certain circumstances even the angles we can bank to in a turn. Our weight is particularly important to consider when we calculate our landing speed. We tend to think of heavier objects as slower, but the amount of lift a wing creates depends on its speed, so a heavier plane must generally move faster. In the 747 every additional 3 tons of weight at landing—cargo, passengers, unburned fuel—demand around an extra knot of airspeed. If there are arrival delays and a jet enters a holding pattern, its weight will continue to fall and we must revise the landing speed downward, knot by knot, as the pounds melt away.

Pilots may think of fuel in different ways at different times—as pure weight; as emissions to be avoided; as the equivalent amount of cargo that it displaces, the payload that cannot be carried on long flights against strong headwinds; as time in the air; as miles on the ground; as money to be saved. Amid such practical considerations I occasionally forget that the fuel itself is ancient, and that if something atavistic courses through the clean, technical wizardry of modern flight—if anything can undercut the Whiggish sense that the future arrived with the airplane—it is fuel. The steadiness with which it disappears during flight, neatly exchanged for hours and miles, seems to proceed according to an immovable calculus, first encountered around campfires and oil lamps, that relates certain substances to the quantity of warmth or light or motion our ancestors learned to summon from them.

Sometimes at night this relationship appears vividly on the earth below, in fire, and we might remember the etymology of
petroleum,
rock-oil, and what it means to extract this liquefied power from the apparent solidity of the planet. When oil comes out of a well, natural gas often comes with it. This gas can be captured and sold, but to do so requires additional equipment and investment. For this reason the gas, especially at remote fields, is simply burned off into the sky, or flared.

I’m flying over Iraq, shortly about to start the descent for Kuwait. On the darkness below me stand what look like enormous candles, not votives but tall tapers that appear to be set deep in the desert. Each flame is so bright that it illuminates a perfect halo or sphere of night around itself, like a bubble blown in light, like a round bulb on a fixture that hangs over the porch of a farmhouse surrounded only by dark fields. The light of these fires is red, occasionally golden, although I often can’t tell whether the gold is only the color of the flame or of the surrounding land as well.

Such flares are a common sight in the skies over much of the petroleum-rich world. The largest of them flicker or pulse before our eyes. At times I can see dozens of them. They form a new landscape of fire, a terrain marked by torching spires, burning up in the nights of the desert or the subarctic. I associate them with the Persian Gulf, but you also see them over Russia and parts of Africa. When I first flew over Indonesia, en route from Singapore to Sydney, I was stunned by the sight of such flares, embedded not in sand but rising from the ink of the open ocean, from the many rigs there.

These flares have an eerie, even allegorical quality. The wells they crown produce the same fuel the plane may burn; in this sense the fires form a kind of fire-shadow of the plane, and of industrial civilization itself, on the earth night below. They hint at the powers we have unleashed or assumed, to so casually pump fire up into the night. Wherever in the world I see these flares, the sight reminds me of Centralia, Pennsylvania, only a few miles away from my mother’s home borough in the coal country, where a barely underground mine fire has been burning for more than fifty years, where steam and smoke rise from cracks behind hilltop cemeteries and snow melts so soon after it lands on the abandoned streets; or of the statue of Prometheus—
forethought
—that stands above the skating rink in Rockefeller Center in New York, under the words of Aeschylus: “Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends.” Mighty ends, we might imagine, like 747s that cross the stars high above our fire mines, at four times the elevation of Mount Olympus.

—

We see another species of fire on the earth. Forest fires are a regular sight from airplanes, one that will perhaps grow only more common due to the effects of climate change. Sometimes on daytime flights over the crumpled mountainscapes of the American West, we can spot thick plumes of gray smoke rising from incinerating mountainsides and, once aloft, twisting and churning in the high wind. Winds often change their speed and direction with altitude; the plumes of smoke from forest fires thus act as a graph, a vertical index of the varying winds they rise through.

The return legs of these flights often take place at night, when the smoke may not be visible but the flames themselves sometimes are. The intensity of the fire’s brightness and color, distilled through distance, is then chilling and unforgettable, as the wattage of nearly everything else you see is dialed so sharply down. The brightness of such flames is like something from a forge, poured in tiny, molten, fingernail-shaped crescents along slopes that are themselves only shadows. It is as striking a sight as blood on snow.

The heat of a fire causes air to rise rapidly above it, which may then form a cloud known as a
pyrocumulus.
Ice can sometimes form in this fire-born apparition. At other times, like some anti-phoenix, rain may fall from such a cloud and extinguish the fire that created it; or bolts of lightning from it may start new fires, and beget new fire-clouds. In some parts of the world—Cyprus, for example—our flight paperwork may contain a message that asks us to report any fires we see, requests that echo one of the earliest uses of the airplane. I don’t think I have ever heard one of these reports given, or even heard
fire
spoken on the radio. If I were going to report a fire on the ground to a controller, I would choose my words carefully.

I’m en route from London to Johannesburg. This is my
hot-and-high
training: a flight to a high-elevation airport in a warm climate, a combination of conditions that presents pilots with a number of challenges.

For now, though, I’m enjoying the peculiar atmosphere of a long overnight flight, the steadier, lower key of this stage of a journey. The passengers have dined and are asleep, the cabin lights are dimmed; one pilot is resting in the bunk, while in the cockpit the conversation between the remaining pilots has dwindled. These are among the night sky’s most inviting moments—their quiet, dark, all-is-well quality cradles the vessel, even as we are moving so freely and in utter solitude between the crowded cities at either end of our journey. I like to think of how the plane might look from the outside, in the eye of some balletic, winged observer soaring without effort toward it in the African night. Mostly dark, the blinds drawn, a few running lights on the extremities, the body of the structure outlined against the stars.

Now we are over Zambia, and I see a dull glow on the horizon. In the extreme clarity of night, light often appears from such an enormous distance that it can remain unclear for a long time whether a distant illumination is a city, the rising moon, a glimpse of the day that is unfurling on the other side of the world, or merely the approach of dawn.

A quarter of an hour later, we see what has lit the sky from such a distance: a vast series of fires on the dark plains below us. These are not the brief rims of flame from a mountain forest fire. These are dozens of interconnected curves of light, their shape and visual effect like flame-capped letters or waves on an inky black. Soon we are directly over these blazing runes. They run from under us to the horizon.

I’ve never seen anything quite so disconcerting from the cockpit. The sight recalls all our older myths and fears, some Jungian-caliber archetype of a fire-rain apocalypse that fractures human order, scatters the animals. The fear of fire is so primal that what’s most jarring is our stately presence and progress above such a scene—our
survey
of it, in the precise sense of that word. I’m struck by the contradiction between some deeply innate reaction to such a vision of conflagration and the plane’s perfectly safe physical and imaginative distance from it—the cup of tea in my hand, the 300 passengers drifting in and out of sleep, the breakfast trays waiting in their trollies, all the engineering and maintenance expertise devoted to ensuring our safety, from fire above all. The burning land turns toward us and then passes behind us, consumed, like everything else in the world, by the steady motion of the wing.

Soon after the sun comes up we start our descent into a bright, bone-dry, ordinary weekday in Johannesburg, the freeways twisting over the mile-high land in the clear light of morning, the hour humming so steadily that a passenger who’d never been here before could be forgiven for thinking we were descending to Los Angeles. Later, at our hotel, I look for stories about the fires, but find none. I can’t believe that something so extraordinary has not made the news. I check the computer again a few days later; still there’s nothing at all about the lands we saw burning up in the night.

—

Before GPS, the small but inherent inaccuracies of navigation meant that planes on the same route would be naturally separated. But once navigation systems were augmented by GPS, the paths of planes could overlay each other almost exactly—so exactly that in some parts of the world pilots reintroduce an arbitrarily chosen
offset
and fly just parallel to the published route, partly to avoid the turbulence of another aircraft’s wake and partly to bring back some of the randomness that, along with air-traffic controllers and various onboard systems, forms yet another layer of separation between nearby planes.

Aircraft at different altitudes often cross paths head-on but at oblique angles, and the straight fast lines of their paths enact a beautiful precision and complexity, as if sketching out the solution to some word problem in a class on heavenly geometry. At other times, traveling in opposite directions on the same route, planes will pass one another head-on, one right over the other. This is common over Russia and Africa, where long, transcontinental airways are often used by traffic going in both directions.

Though we usually see an approaching plane on our computer screens long before we can see it with our own eyes, looking out of the window remains an important, amazing part of my job. The closing speed of two aircraft is searing, easily 1,200 miles per hour. No sooner do you see the oncoming plane than it is above you, and then it is gone; the fastest event I’ll ever see with my own eyes, and a particularly clear view of “this whole new business of speed,” as in Faulkner’s description of aviation.

I once drove through rural South Africa. After dark the roads were all but empty, and later we were told that it was foolish of us to drive on those desolate roads, far from towns, late at night. On the rare occasions that we saw the lights of another car in the far distance, we would remark on it and mentally brace ourselves for the noise, the bright headlights, the reciprocal, high-fiving gusts that would rock both cars at the moment we passed each other in the night. Then we would talk of something else, listen to several songs, and have an entire conversation before we saw any lights again, perhaps as we came to the crest of a hill. Only after a moment would we realize that it was the same lights of the same car, still far away, which we had forgotten about. The lights at such a pronounced distance in an utterly dark landscape always gave the illusion that the car was much closer.

At night, in a plane, this effect is magnified. We see an approaching plane—or its lights, at least—across a much greater distance than is possible during the day, 40 miles or more, though still, of course, a distance measured in minutes. I like to think of the name of a town 40 miles from home, and what the possibility of light from such unmoored distances says about the clarity of the air and the perfection of the high darkness.

Sometimes on a bus I see the driver wave casually to the driver of another bus passing in the opposite direction, and I don’t know how well they know each other, if they are friends or if they are merely strangers exchanging a professional courtesy. Planes always fly with some lights illuminated, but in the lonelier skies of Africa, in the heart of the small hours of a long overnight flight, the pilot of one aircraft, seeing the approach of another, may briefly flash their landing lights. It’s a kind of wave across the icy nothing above the jungles or deserts, perhaps under the rising Southern Cross. The other pilot, seeing the lights of the other aircraft illuminate, will generally reciprocate.