Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot

by Mark Vanhoenacker

  I don’t mean to suggest that the portions of the earth that look empty have not been disturbed—nearly all of them have been, not least by climate change, to which the planes that carry us over such places make a growing contribution—or that we can make useful assessments of our impact on the environment from casual aerial observations. Only a specialist can look down on a brown autumn landscape of Canada or Finland, for example, and say where the snow would likely have fallen by this date a hundred years ago.

  But if you have ever hiked or driven through a very rural area or a nature reserve, and looked closely at the many lesser peaks that surround one well-known mountain, and speculated on whether anyone has ever stood on them, or even whether some have ever been given a name, then that is exactly the feeling I often have while looking out from the window seat of a long-haul airliner. In all contradiction to what we know about our negative influences on the world, so often from above it’s disturbingly easy to imagine that we are the first to look upon the earth, that we are seeking a level place to set down our ship.

  —

  The author J. G. Ballard wrote that “civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical worldview were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747.” Those who fly often may naturally acquire the worldview, inaugurated by the 747, that takes a planet to be a reasonably sized thing.

  I’ve come to measure out countries in jet time. Algeria surprised me, when I first started to fly across Africa. North to south it is nearly a two-hour country and I now feel what I did not then know, that it is the largest country in Africa. Norway, too, was another surprise, on routes to Japan that give us this country from end to Norwegian end; in the north of a continent crowded with smallish countries it is a fully two-hour land. France at the angles I most often cross it is a land of around one hour, as are the states of Texas and Montana. Belgium, with a healthy tailwind, is a fifteen-minute country. On many routes Russia is a seven-hour country, though really it’s best imagined as a day-long or night-long land.

  I often fly over tiny, windswept Heligoland, an island in the German Bight of the North Sea; there is an important beacon there that many pilots will know. Britain once swapped its Heligoland for Germany’s Zanzibar, off East Africa. Pilots may swap cities, countries, continents just as nonchalantly. I might give a colleague a Johannesburg on Monday for their Los Angeles on Tuesday, or exchange a Lagos for a Kuwait. Some crew find their body clocks prefer one time direction over another, and so they will say that they “do better east” or “do better west” and may ask to swap with a colleague of an opposite-pointing disposition. I generally prefer west to east, though I’m still occasionally surprised to hear myself talking about cardinal directions as if they were brands of breakfast cereal.

  I might eat dinner with a member of the cabin crew at a Belgian restaurant in Beijing, and he may ask if I know this or that Thai restaurant in San Francisco, or a new café in Johannesburg that he heard about on his last trip to Sydney. Countries blur, cities elide. Airline crews experience this age of cities, if not quite as casually as they do the rooms of their homes, as little more than different districts of the earth metropolis. Someone asks me if I can recommend a good spot for breakfast in Shanghai. I pause—I cannot think of a place. It takes me a moment to remember that I have never been to Shanghai.

  In contrast with the various species of lag and the occasional loneliness of my job, I have enjoyed connections that would otherwise not have been possible. There are many friends from high school and college whom I see regularly only because I am a pilot and can fly to the far-off places in which they now live. When I flew short flights within Europe, I was able to visit relatives in Belgium and Sweden almost as often as I pleased. It was as if a switch had been turned on, and entire branches of the family tree were re-illuminated. I would move so often and so casually around Stockholm that my once-unremarkable inability to speak Swedish began to seem increasingly strange to me.

  For many years, too, I would go to Paris at least once a month. One afternoon I went to the Musée Rodin, and as I walked down the rue de Varenne I had a sudden memory that this was the neighborhood in which my mother had lived when she studied for a year in Paris. She had told me the name of this very street, perhaps, as part of her story about the French strangers who gathered around her to offer condolences, when they heard her accent on the day that President Kennedy was shot. I called her in Massachusetts, interrupting her breakfast. Yes, she said, with a smile I could hear even as her voice drifted off, it seemed, into memory; she had indeed lived on the rue de Varenne. I took many photographs of the street and her old building from different viewpoints, and mailed them to her.

  I had a pen pal in Australia when I was a child, a friendship that was held together by the tissue of aerograms until the night, two and a half decades after we had first written, when I myself was charged with flying the airmail to Australia. My colleagues and I flew from Singapore across Indonesia, then across the entire outback to Sydney, where after a long sleep and an enormous cup of coffee I met my pen pal for the first time ever, at a bar on the promenade below the Opera House. Australia will never feel close to me. But that one month it had nevertheless appeared on my schedule, in the small-print, all-capitals form of the ordinary airport code, SYD, and the long arc of a childhood transoceanic friendship—formed precisely because there was almost no chance I myself would ever travel such a distance—was closed.

  A pilot’s awareness that the whole world is possible is most acute when on standby. Sometimes these standby duties take place at an airport, but often they are assigned at home, where we are required to be reachable by telephone, and to be within a certain travel time of the airport. When another pilot cannot make it to work—illness, a child-care problem, a flat tire—then a standby pilot is called. Sometimes by the time I reach the airport the passengers have already boarded, the fuel and cargo are loaded, and staff are standing by the airplane’s last open door, waving their hands at an oblique angle that suggests both a greeting and the direction in which I should keep moving, through the airplane door that they will close as soon as I pass through it.

  When I’m on standby I have a bag permanently packed, with both winter gloves and a bathing suit amid the uniform shirts, a bag for all lands, all seasons. I’ll be at home cleaning, or at the supermarket, or running in the park, when my phone will ring and a voice tells me that I’m bound for Bangkok or Boston or Bangalore. I return home, pick up my bag, and fly there.

  Occasionally I think that the more broadly you wish to experience the world, the more certain it is that you would enjoy being a pilot, even if flying itself isn’t your first love. Alfred de Musset, in a sonnet dedicated to Victor Hugo, wrote that in this “low world” you should love many things, in order to know at the end the thing you love best.

  He lists some things we might love. He includes the sea and the blue of the heavens, and few pilots would disagree. But a pilot might also take the “low world” more literally. If you are interested in motorcycling or urban design, opera or kite surfing, hiking or languages, the whole world of these things opens to you, at least on long-haul trips, where even if you are able to fall asleep for a half day after arrival and before departure, you often have an entirely clear day or two in between. In many cities—Bangkok, Mexico City, Tokyo—cooking schools offer short courses that are popular with pilots and cabin crew, an opportunity to ground ourselves in the tastes of a new place and to do the cooking that a life of hotels and restaurants cuts us off from. Sometimes everyone at such a class works for one airline or another, sharing a few hours and a table in a far place.

  Many of the pursuits that fill our off-duty hours are aligned with the natural world. I have flown with pilots who explore botanical gardens wherever they go, or put time changes to good use by rising early to photograph sunrises. If you have an interest in wildlife, you will have the opportunity to see pandas or elephants or
tigers or whales where they live, or to see birds in one season and continent, and then later in another; to overfly their migrations and wait for them somewhere else. You might read a book about the great trees of the world and a few years later have stood under many of them in their original habitats.

  I don’t mean to diminish the many challenges of the job—the initial training costs that burden most new pilots with home mortgage–sized loans; the days and nights and holidays so far away from family and friends; the irregular schedules that make regular commitments to neighbors or local sports teams or community organizations so challenging; the permanent regimen of biannual, multiday simulator exams; the physical stresses of unpatterned night shifts, time-zone changes, and other circadian upheavals; and the knowledge that our livelihood can vanish entirely in the furrowing of a doctor’s brow during one of our regular medical checkups. Flying is work in every sense. (“The reason you fly,” admonishes the father of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, “is to eat.”) But there are few jobs, I think, whose side rewards are so varied—as wide as the whole world—and so freely determined by the individuals involved.

  One of my own interests when I am away for work—downroute, as we say—is hiking, which seems to help with both place lag and jet lag, although whether this effect is due to the exercise or the simple act of placing my boots on the soil, I do not know.

  I’m walking in a park in South Africa; it is hot and dusty; I am here with several of the flight attendants and the pilots. The soil is red and the sky is blue; we are sleepy but the sun and conversation keep us awake. It was nearly freezing when we left London last night; overcast, late autumn, the anti-icers running on all the engines for takeoff. Dawn came over Botswana, and as we descended together toward Johannesburg a few hours ago, we saw this land below, this color, smoothed to perfect abstraction and running to the horizon as the sun rose on this spring morning in southern Africa. Now I’m walking on the land we crossed over. This soil gusts up in small crimson clouds with each step of mine that falls on it. A colleague points to a tree, to a weaver nest hanging from a branch; he tells me that the birds are named for their skill in making these nests.

  It’s four days later. I’m at home, standing sleepily by the sink. The water runs over the soles of my sneakers, sweeping the African dust brightly over the stainless steel. I have to say it in my head, practically spell it out: “This is the red of the soil under the South African tree, from the morning I saw the weavers and their nests.” I think of the term earth, both soil and planet; this earth could not have expected to meet this water, here. People become quickly accustomed to peculiar aspects of any job. I try hard to remember that this is an unusual experience of the world—to have stood on the earth there, then there on it and there, then suddenly to find myself alone on an ordinary afternoon, quietly washing it from my shoes.

  Wayfinding

  In 1904, at a time when pocket watches predominated among men, the great Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont asked Louis Cartier to make a wristwatch for him, to help him time airborne events without lifting a hand from the aircraft controls.

  Today I am required to wear a watch to work—digital or analog—and to check its accuracy before departure. All aviation runs on a single time zone, variously called UTC (Universal Time Coordinated), GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) or Zulu, the last in an alphabet of military abbreviations for time zones. Schedules are written in it, and it is the only time that the airplane computers know or display. When I make an entry into these flight computers, I distinguish the time 1400 hours from the altitude of 1,400 feet by appending a Z, for Zulu, to the former. My work schedule is printed in GMT each month. When an airport publishes the hours of a temporarily closed taxiway, or the day and time a line of thunderstorms is expected to arrive overhead, all this is written in our global time. Often not only the time but also the date of the crew’s departure is different from that of the passengers on the same flight. Your Monday evening departure from San Francisco takes place, for me and everyone else working on the plane, on Tuesday morning.

  Language, too, is standardized. Commercial airline pilots, regardless of nationality, will speak English; we also share the technical dialect of aviation. I may never meet a 747 pilot from China or Germany, but if I did I would be able to discuss my work with them, in English. The language of the labels in the cockpit is English. When the plane itself speaks to us out loud, it speaks in English.

  Worldwide, air-traffic controllers can speak in English, but a set of “English” terms so specific to aviation that few who are not pilots or controllers would understand the distinctions they contain. In certain countries, controllers speak to local airline pilots in their local language, and such pilots will feel more at home there. But in much of the world’s busiest airspace, controllers will assiduously adhere to English. The truth of globalization is never clearer than when, for example, I arrive overhead a German airport and German controllers are speaking to German pilots, but not in German.

  —

  If aviation is commonly associated with the leveling of differences, with the bulldozing of borders between places and times and languages, it has also resulted in the creation of new realms of geography—a new world, high above the old one, that is not yet fully charted.

  The sky is divided into administrative divisions of airspace. These divisions aren’t straightforward; there are various, often overlapping kinds, and often the name of a region on a map is not the same as that used to identify the controllers and radio operators we speak to there. The sky regions may be roughly equal to an earthly place you have heard of, or smaller, or much larger. Those that cover coastal areas may soar out from their littoral realm, across dizzying swathes of open sea, until they meet a region that does the same from another continent, and these two boxes of air meet at the air wall between them; coastlines that meet only other air-coastlines. At the poles many regions meet, the common points of many slices of aerial pie.

  Though they are not well matched to terrestrial places, these regions have borders. Their names have histories. They are the countries of the sky.

  All Japan lies in one region. The name of it is not Japan, but Fukuoka; yet within this sky country marked on the map we speak to controllers who answer variously to Sapporo Control, to Tokyo Control. America’s regions look much as its states might, if some pitiless war or committee had hugely reduced their number. Salt Lake City (abbreviated to Salt Lake, as in “contact now Salt Lake, on frequency 135.775”) covers parts of nine states, from southern Nevada, north over the Great Salt Lake itself and its city to the Canadian border, which it meets between the sky states of Seattle and Minneapolis. Southern Illinois is not part of Chicago; it’s divided between the dominions of Kansas City, Indianapolis (sometimes called Indy Center), and Memphis. There is a region called New York; yet most of New York State lies in Boston, which also encompasses all of New England.

  In contrast to America’s consolidated sky states, many small European countries have kept their own regions. Switzerland has done so; its sky land is called Switzerland but it’s Swiss or Swiss Radar that the controllers answer to. “Swiss, good evening,” I might say, followed by my call sign. The region is so small, and planes so fast, that a jet may cross through it in minutes. Greek controllers may answer to Athens Control but their sky country is marked on charts as Hellas—Greece. On the busy routes along the Adriatic coast, a plane may be in the sky country known as Beograd—Belgrade—for only minutes; the controller there will say hello to us, before almost immediately transferring us to the next shard of the former Yugoslavia.

  The sky known as Maastricht makes an auspicious contrast to such fractured air. Maastricht is the legacy and incarnation of a high, early dream of European integration that’s now sometimes called the Single European Sky. Perhaps the best-known volume of air to most European pilots, Maastricht covers the higher airspace of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, northwest Germany, and certain nearby areas, a whole and peaceful dominio
n that rises over some of the continent’s historically bloodiest borders. I’ve been to Maastricht, on the ground, but if you said the name to me, I would not think of the Dutch city, of earth-Maastricht. I would think instead of sky-Maastricht, this invisible block of the heavens resting on the fragmented history of the northwest corner of the continent. Sky-Maastricht is not Belgium or Luxembourg or the Netherlands, yet its cold aerial polyhedron, sharply bordered and as meaningless as sliced air, blankets them all—a new, improbably named country above Europe.

  The names of air regions may not correspond to any place on earth that is familiar to me. The syllables then form a kind of aerial poetry, a drumbeat of far sky-lands beyond the next fold of the chart: Turkmenabat and its sister Turkmenbashi; Vientiane, Wuhan, and Kota Kinabalu; Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Norilsk, and Poliarny. Or the names match those of legend, those that might be among the last you would expect to rise to such prominence in the modern sky: Arkhangelsk and Dushanbe; and Samarkand, the city that Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta wrote of, which fell to Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan.