Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (9 page)

Many names in the new geography of the sky reflect aviation’s nautical heritage and the water below them. Near Perth, Australia, are the waypoints FLEET, ANCOR, BRIGG, SAILS, KEELS, WAVES. South of Newfoundland, in the vicinity of the historic Grand Banks fishing grounds, is the waypoint BANCS; further north along the Canadian coast lie SCROD and PRAWN. Sometimes there are multiple waypoints with the same name, and when we type one into a flight computer, it will ask us which of these homonymous, far-scattered places we mean to navigate toward. There are five SHARK waypoints—one east of Sydney, the others off the islands of Jersey, Maui, Taiwan, and Trinidad.

Near the Isle of Man is KELLY, in reference to an old music-hall song called “Kelly from the Isle of Man.” Off England’s Channel coast are DRAKE—for Sir Francis—and HARDY—for Sir Thomas, the old friend to whom Lord Nelson, as he lay dying on the deck of his flagship, was heard to say: “Kiss me, Hardy,” and “God bless you, Hardy.” On sky maps of the Tasman Sea, the triangles that denote the waypoints hanging like notes on a musical staff arcing toward New Zealand are marked WALTZ, INGMA, and TILDA—a reference to Australia’s unofficial anthem, “Waltzing Matilda”—while many thousands of miles west, running north to south over hundreds of miles of Indian Ocean off Western Australia, is a lyrical sequence that begins WONSA, JOLLY, SWAGY, CAMBS, BUIYA, BYLLA, and BONGS—“Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong…”

Continental Europe has fewer locally themed waypoints, or at least fewer that are apparent to an English speaker, though off the Dutch coast floats TULIP, and it’s easy to speculate about SASKI—Rembrandt’s wife was Saskia. Over Germany, an English speaker might hear ROTEN as a meaningless, albeit pronounceable word; a German pilot might hear the bells of the medieval town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Crossing the border between Austria and Germany are a series of waypoint names that form awkward phrases. NIGEB—DENED—IRBIR is a loose variation on the German
Nie gebt denen ihr Bier:
“Don’t ever give them [the pilots?] their beer.” In the heavens near Stuttgart are VATER and UNSER, “Our Father” (“who art in heaven,” as the Lord’s Prayer continues). Northeast of Nuremberg, near the German–Czech border, are ARMUT, “poverty,” and VEMUT,
Wehmut,
German’s fine old word for “wistfulness.”

Near the border of India and Pakistan is the waypoint TIGER. Another TIGER forms part of an arrival pattern for London, as if lifted from Britain’s former empire as incongruously as an animal taken from a warm place to a zoo in a cold city. On flights from Singapore to London I may overfly both TIGERs in the same night.

America’s sky-mappers have gone to more trouble than most to ensure that local colors fly in the country’s skies. The Sonoma County airport in California is named after Charles M. Schulz; nearby is the waypoint SNUPY. Near Kansas City are the culinary waypoints BARBQ, SPICY, SMOKE, RIBBS, and BRSKT. Near Detroit is PISTN, surely for the basketball team whose name reflects the city’s heritage of industry; the skies around Detroit also feature MOTWN and WONDR (Stevie, Michigan-born) and EMINN, perhaps for the rap star. Houston’s nearby SSLAM is followed a few miles beyond by DUUNK (not to be confused with DUNKK, near Boston, a reference perhaps to a certain Massachusetts-born doughnut chain). The skies around Houston also feature ROKIT for the city’s space legacy, and TQELA, WORUM, CRVZA (beer), CARNE (meat), and QUESO (cheese) for the city’s cross-border culinary traditions that arriving passengers may soon be enjoying.

Boston has lifted a particularly intricate constellation of itself into the ether above New England. There is PLGRM, for the region’s history; CHWDH, LBSTA, and CLAWW for its food; GLOWB and HRALD cover the city’s newspapers; while SSOXS, FENWY, BAWLL, STRKK, and OUTTT chronicle the anguishes of the city’s baseball team across the heavens. Even the region’s speech—WIKID, followed by PAHTI—seems to be mapped. There’s a NIMOY waypoint; Leonard was born in Boston. LYHTT floats above the harbor island on which stands Boston Light, the 1783 replacement of the 1716 beacon that a twelve-year-old Benjamin Franklin memorialized in a ballad. Passengers may cross the LYHTT waypoint and see this lighthouse, the first in what would become the United States and the only one that retains a lighthouse keeper, as they descend to the city it marks.

St. Louis has the nearby waypoints ANNII and LENXX, for reasons that aviation authorities could not explain to me; perhaps it’s only that an air-traffic controller there was a Eurythmics fan. The origins of other waypoints near St. Louis—AARCH, for example, a reference to the city’s skyscraping Gateway Arch—are less obscure. Mark Twain died seven years after the first flight at Kitty Hawk. The riverboat pilot himself never flew. But
Tom Sawyer Abroad
features a “noble big balloon” equipped with “wings and fans and all sorts of things,” and in an 1869 letter Twain wrote that “the grand problem of aerial navigation” is “a subject that is bound to stir the pulses of any man”—reasons enough to think he might be pleased by the thought of the sky place TWAIN, above Hannibal, his childhood home on the Mississippi.

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As a sequence of places—beacons, waypoints—a route becomes its own kind of place. In the Japanese language there are many 
counter
words to enumerate conceptually similar kinds of objects. English, as instructors may point out to students of Japanese, has a few such analogous words. We say three loaves of bread or two sheets of paper, so
loaf
and
sheet
are our counter words for bread and paper. We think of
sheet
as a concept of form and apply it to many flat things such as aluminum and pastry. One’s favorite counter is a regular topic of conversation among foreigners studying Japanese. I’ve always liked 本,
hon
—perhaps because it is also the
hon
in 日本, Nihon or Nippon, Japan, the destination of my high-school summer homestay and some of my most memorable subsequent journeys, first as a consultant and later as a pilot. As a counter, 本 is used for long, cylindrical objects such as pencils, films, roads, and rivers. 本 can be used to enumerate air routes. Contrails, too.

The exact route a plane flies between two cities often changes. Airways are pre-published lists of waypoints and navigation beacons, crossing steadily over the undisturbed and uncharted fields and forests and rivers below. Flight planners and pilots choose among the various airways that can link two cities, accounting for the wind, airspace closures, congestion, and navigation charges imposed by overflown countries. One path intersects another, and a flight plan will often jump between airways at these junctions, tacking a wind-optimized path over the earth. Other routes, like those over the North Atlantic, are drawn anew each day by air-traffic authorities, to reap the most of tailwinds or the least of headwinds. In some parts of the world there are few or no formal airways, nor wind-sculpted schedules of daily routes. In such open sky country flight planners are free to compose their own route each day, from raw points of latitude and longitude—digital fictions in the ether that the broad sunlit wings of a high 747 will overfly long after the planner has returned home, eaten dinner, turned the lights off, and gone to bed.

Often the technical precision of routes barely conceals their historical and cultural resonance. The daily routes over the North Atlantic are typically called
the tracks,
a general term for the thick, highly trafficked belt of routes between Europe and North America, and a daily refrain to the bonds—of exploration, empire, language, trade, culture—that run as deeply as ever across these waters. Over Africa, the predominant flow of traffic is traditionally from north to south, but during Islam’s Hajj pilgrimage, a huge flow of east–west air traffic briefly arises, crossing northern Africa toward Mecca, a season of the air that is an echo and a reversed image of the historical flow of Islam itself. There are special Hajj charts and procedures, issued each year to pilots who will be crossing North Africa at that time.

Not long ago we switched from mostly paper charts to mostly electronic ones, stored on tablet computers. The paper charts we used until recently, though falling out of technological favor, are more interesting, because their designers could not place everything on them, nor could pilots simply select different layers of information to display or hide. The choices required by the mapmaker reveal much about the geography of the sky. The paper charts show airports, but not the cities they correspond to. They don’t show roads, or the earthbound borders of provinces or states. Mountains are unnamed and exist not as peaks or contours on these charts but as generalized heights for an area. Even the names and borders of countries are not displayed prominently. The most obvious features on these paper maps are complex networks of dark lines, the routes that link waypoints, the highways of the aerial world.

Even the cut of the paper follows routes, which follow history. Most ordinary maps—those in a typical atlas, for example—appear to be rectangles lifted directly from the earth. The top of the map is roughly north, the bottom south. But the rectangular en-route paper charts are often not aligned this way. In their off-kilter calibrations we see the deep axes of empires, migration, and the whole of human geography, as clearly as the archaeologists who made some of the earliest uses of aircraft, to discern man-made patterns on the earth. For example, the paper maps that a pilot may follow from Europe to Hong Kong are not oriented to north. Instead they are cut in long, great-circling arcs that roughly echo the typical routes between Europe and China, so that the left edge of the rectangular sheet faces northwest, and the right edge faces southeast. Over central and northern Canada a series of charts runs in a similar but more sharply tilted orientation that only makes sense in the context of the air links between eastern North America and East Asia.

Routes often have a personal weight. Frequent travelers over the North Atlantic, for example, will have an intuitive sense of just what the plane connects; the cultural and historical bridge that each of their own journeys reflects and renews. The first time I flew across Australia, from Singapore to Sydney, we made landfall on the country’s northwest coast, near Broome. Then we followed a series of long airways that arced across the continent toward the southeast. The distant lights of Alice Springs reminded me that I had first read this name in a Hardy Boys story that hinged partly on the revelation that this overheard name was a reference to a place and not a person.

As we crossed the outback it was hard not to think of song lines—of not just the route in the computer but of how everyone onboard might imagine the line of space between the paired cities, our individual assemblies of mental and physical geographies. For passengers a route exists in the moving map on cabin screens, but also in their understanding of how two particular cities differ and why they are flying from one to the other, and of what stands or floats between them. Most of the Australians onboard that night would surely have had a deeper sense of the route than any foreign pilot flying over it for the first time.

Eventually, routes become familiar to pilots, and then the passage of landscapes, sky regions, or beacons give journeys between two cities a unique pace. Pilots will acquire this background sense of the progression of a route just as the conclusion of one song on a beloved playlist leads you to anticipate the next; or as you might intuitively and almost unconsciously travel along the series of landmarks that guides you to a friend’s house and from there to the supermarket and from there back to home. The sky regions, for example, pass in as orderly and ordinary a fashion as the sequence of towns on a car journey, marked by welcome signs along the road. We might sense our progress northeast from Houston, say, as the rhythm of the sky realms Houston, Fort Worth, Memphis, Indianapolis, Cleveland. A flight from Arabia northwest to Europe traverses Jeddah, Cairo, Hellas, Tirana.

When I fly from London to Los Angeles, first is England, of course, much of which has already passed by before a heavy 747 reaches its first cruising altitude. Next are Scotland’s great cities, Edinburgh and Glasgow, which always appear on our computer, but rarely, given their typical weather, in the window itself. Then there’s Stornoway, in the Outer Hebrides—there is a beacon there, and to cross it feels like an aerial Land’s End, the sky tip of Britain—and then if I can see the water I may remember the song I love by Karine Polwart, about the sea off Scotland, where “the waves swell like a barley field that’s ready to lay down.” Next, perhaps, are the Faroes, though not every route goes near them and they are shyer, more cloud-veiled even than Scotland; I have only seen them a few times.

Next Iceland’s mountains and glaciers appear as digitized bumps on the screen, and occasionally in white, outside the window. Then sea, and perhaps night itself this far north, depending on the season, and Greenland, which is often brilliantly clear. After Greenland comes hours of white over Canada, a wilderness that eventually fractures into fields and roads and other sensible or familiar ideas. We cannot see the American border itself, but we overfly Interstate 90, the easy-to-spot road that runs clear across the continent between Seattle and Boston.

Then, if I am approaching Los Angeles from the northeast, come the Rockies, and road-etched deserts, and more mountains before the city waiting beyond, on the sea. If, however, I arrive from the north, I can count off the landmarks of America’s snow-fired ring of prominent volcanoes: Mount Baker, Mount Rainier, Mount Hood, the sky-blue caldera of Crater Lake, and soon enough the snowy, stand-alone slopes of Mount Shasta, America’s Fuji, which dominates the skies of Northern California and is said to be inhabited by the spirit of the Above-World, an assertion that few who see it, whether from below or above, would bet against.

Such geographic mileposts echo in the airplane, and even in the mundanities—sleeping, eating—of a pilot’s life. The timing of our rotating breaks means that changeovers usually take place over roughly the same parts of the earth. On many routes between London and western North America, for example, Greenland’s mountains roughly correspond to the first changeover, and so the mountains, approached from the east, are to me associated with leaving the controls to go to the bunk. Similarly, they are what a pilot returning to duty expects to see crossing the windows of the cockpit when the other pilot, reminded by the sight of white peaks rising from blue sea, has gone off to rest.