Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot

by Mark Vanhoenacker

  It’s been fifteen years or so since that first lesson in a small plane over the autumn-tinged hills of western Massachusetts. I’ve been flying the Airbus for some time now. I have just finished a flight to Hamburg, during which we spoke to controllers who answer to the name of Bremen Radar. From the cockpit the captain and I saw the sun-sprayed Elbe and the beacon of the same name, which was lit on our screens and receivers. My job has brought me to Hamburg many times already. So today, instead of my usual walk along the Binnenalster Lake toward a café in the city’s old town, the captain and I are making a visit to the plant where the airliner we flew today was built.

  We organized the visit only an hour before we left London. We called the factory and said: We fly the Airbus and later today we are flying one to Hamburg that was built there. One moment, said whoever answered the phone, then: Very well, what time do you land? We are treated well at the factory—vigorous handshakes, a huge lunch, a gleaming German luxury sedan—so well that we fear there’s been a certain misunderstanding, that our hosts are expecting us to sign purchase agreements, to lay down an airliner-sized deposit, before the end of our afternoon together.

  The plant, a complex of enormous buildings, is an exalted place—though like airplanes themselves, a mix of the extraordinary and the humdrum. The interior volume is enormous, inhuman in its scale, yet as clean as a hospital. Some airplane factories are so large that clouds once formed inside them, a foreshadowing of the sky to come for each newborn jet. As a workplace an aircraft factory seems as inherently gratifying, as backgrounded by a general radiation of satisfaction, as cockpits are. I am struck for the first time that those who work here may have a sense of the airplane that is deeper, even, than that of those of us who fly them. The workers who crafted early airplanes were once compared to those who built Chartres. Still today, in a cathedral of industry, new vessels are taking shape; great forms are raised by the most skilled hands of our age.

  While each part waits for its appointment with the new machine, it may rest on a shelf in the factory. On an aircraft that is only days away from delivery, I see an otherwise complete cockpit that has no seats—a cartoon awaiting a caption, or a vision of some pilotless future of aviation. Later, on the factory floor I see a rack against the wall, stacked with little trash receptacles, each equipped with a simple flap. These bins are certified, weighed, and accounted for like almost no others. At a precise moment in the birth of each airliner, a worker will carry two of these into the unusual, newly sculpted room that is the cockpit, where each will spend the next two decades or so receiving banana peels, empty bags of nuts, pens that have run out of ink, and receipts from foreign restaurants.

  A few minutes after my encounter with what are almost certainly some of the world’s most expensive trash cans, we enter a large hall that is lined with enormous slices of fuselage—the double-decker cross sections of a new aircraft model. The silent sections are unpainted and separate, and no workers are moving around them, a stateliness of process, a tranquillity that only heightens both their complexity and the scale of their itinerant life to come. Though the building shines with modern machinery and lights and the sight could be taken from science fiction, I feel that I might as well be in some bygone forge or foundry, that the roar of blast furnaces must be near, that something raw and precious has been poured into new alloys, hammered, cooled into the curved walls that will now be joined.

  A few minutes later we turn a corner and I see a pair of wings, as they are quietly maneuvered into position. I think of the word airborne, what this plane’s passengers will be, that these wings will hold them. The sight, though, as if lifted from some gauzily bright future of our species, is anchored by the weight of ancient or archetypal rites—the laying of a keel, the benediction of what will bear us over the world—that we hear in “Marina,” by T. S. Eliot: “The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.”

  —

  As a postgraduate in England I studied African history, and halfway through my studies I traveled to Nairobi, where I planned to stay for a year. I flew from London to Muscat, and then to Nairobi. On the way we flew down the Somali coastline—I had never before seen a land of such colors, mixed yellow and deep red—and I realized that one reason for my particular excitement about this journey was that it required two flights, not one. Perhaps, even, I was more excited about flying to Kenya than about what I hoped to find in a dusty archive there.

  My mother and I both loved Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. My mom had left her small hometown in Pennsylvania for work and college, and later lived in Paris; her love for the book was perhaps because it’s a tale of a great life-journey that starts and ends in a small place. Personally I loved the book best for its descriptions of flight, and as the plane descended over the hills around Nairobi I half-seriously asked myself whether, if the book had not contained such elegiac descriptions of aviation, I might have picked a different branch of history, if I might now be flying to a different country or continent. My mom’s copy, which came from the Book-of-the-Month Club, is still on my shelf at home, though it’s missing its cover. Next to it is a first edition of the book—published in 1937, the year my mother was born—that I was given not long after she died.

  Each morning I walked into Nairobi from a small apartment just north of town. In the archive I sat with a notebook and a computer and worked through stacks of colonial-era documents. For lunch I walked around the center, trying different cafés. Nairobi was first a railway camp; often I took a sandwich to eat on a bench at the city’s fabled station, where the trains from Mombasa still come.

  I left the archive early one day to visit the house of Dinesen and the grave of Denys Finch Hatton, both in the Ngong Hills they flew over together. When Dinesen came from Denmark to Kenya she sailed to Mombasa on the coast, and then traveled on the train that climbed up to the new city in the highlands. Later I would learn about the navigation beacons named for the Ngong Hills. The name and the frequencies, 315 kHz and 115.9 MHz, are marked near a peak on the modern arrival charts that every airliner flying here will carry. My tour’s van left from an international hotel in the center of the city. In the lobby I saw happy crews from the airline I would one day work for, arriving from their flight, suitcases clattering over the floor, lining up to organize other tours. Their work, I marveled, had been to fly here.

  A few months later I decided to leave—the library, Nairobi, my postgraduate program. At that point I was still not certain I wanted to become an airline pilot. But on the flight back to London I asked to visit the cockpit and, during my half-hour visit, we overflew Istanbul. The Golden Horn and the Bosporus and the domes and minarets of the city were lit sideways, perfectly, by late-afternoon sunlight. Asia was disappearing under the nose; there ahead lay Europe; here, between them, it must be Istanbul. “The city of the world’s desire,” said the captain, pointing. “Constantinople,” he added, when he saw my blank face. I was struck by the age of the Bahraini copilot, who must have been only in his late twenties. He was hardly older than me. We talked about his career, my interest in flying. “Oh, you should do it,” he said with a smile from behind his aviator glasses, in barely accented English.

  I returned to my seat, put my headphones on, and watched Europe unroll from one end to the other. The music’s effect on my reflections and the passing world was even more montage-like than usual. I no longer keep a regular diary but when I was younger I loved to write in the window seat with my headphones on. I still occasionally see passengers who have made this same arrangement of window, music, and paper—travelers who have taken an old-school approach to their geo-graphy, their writing of the world. That pilot was right, I thought. This is what I love best. The moment I made my decision to become an airline pilot came a few hours later, when I was on a bus, rolling clockwise down the M25 motorway from Heathrow.

  My journey to the cockpit had one more stop: a job in the business world to repay student loans and start to save the money I expected I would need fo
r my flight training. I had often heard complaints about the amount of travel that management consulting required. Naturally I applied to every consulting firm I could find. I had no response from the five large consultancies I first applied to. Later I found a glaring spelling mistake in the first line of my cover letter. I corrected it and applied more widely. Eventually I took a job at a much smaller firm in Boston; I was drawn to its friendly atmosphere, the possibility of travel all over the world, and an office in a charming redbrick dockside building that enjoyed stunning views of the city’s old harbor and the airport across it. Three years later, I left that job to start my flight training in Britain, on a course sponsored by an airline, part of a group of aspiring pilots who are today still my best friends at work.

  As an educational experience, private flying is practical and hands-on. Commercial flying, on a residential course like the one I followed, is entirely different. About half of the eighteen months or so of that course were spent entirely in the classroom. And so, having left the academic world behind some years earlier, I was surprised to find myself again at a desk with a notebook, worrying about exams, and studying late into the night with friends in the common areas of a crowded hall of residence.

  The historian I. B. Holley wrote that we have neglected the creativity that makes our technology possible. I certainly had. When I returned to the classroom I held the simplistic view that academia, and perhaps much of the thinking and working of the world, was neatly divided. There were so-called creative or “soft” fields—those whose practitioners try to work outside the box, or to think about the biases of a box, who talk about why boxes are important or beautiful, and the history of boxes, and why some boxes hate other boxes, and how boxes are depicted in the arts. Then there were the “hard” professions—those whose acolytes are devoted to the evolution of boxes, to their chemistry or mathematics, or to the design and construction of more reliable ones.

  Never in my life has a view that I held been overturned as cleanly and quickly as this one. Within the first hours of my new classes on aircraft technology, and again and again throughout my training, I was struck by the extraordinary creativity of engineering, by the art of flying: how connections are made between substances or disciplines, how an effect in a system is conjured as carefully as that of a story, a poem, or a song. And engineers are confined by a frame of physical laws and, especially in aviation, by a web of rigid constraints—weight, reliability, near-perfect safety—that might make a composer of haikus blanch.

  I marveled, too, at the similarities between engineering and biology, how engineers are the agents of a kind of evolution, the conscious evolution that is the work of an industrializing species. This thought first occurred to me early in my flight training, when I was taught about a device called a fuel-cooled oil cooler. The oil in the engines gets very hot, while the fuel in the wings gets very cold, especially on long flights at high altitude. So airliners may deploy heat exchangers, which allow the engine oil to transfer excess heat to the fuel, without mixing the two. While the instructor was describing this, I thought of the high-school biology class in which I learned that whales use a certain kind of heat exchanger to transfer warmth from arterial to venous blood. It’s just one of many examples of the convergence of evolution and engineering. Airliners have skins that like any skin serve to regulate what passes through; they have circulatory systems; they maintain a self-regulating, all but biological level of homeostasis. Like our awareness of the location of our limbs, they have proprioception of the positions in space of flight controls. Airliners’ ability to self-monitor many systems, and their carefully graded hierarchy of notifications and alarms, have many features in common with pain. Airplanes store maps and adapt them in real time; they sense many qualities of the world around them such as temperatures and wind, and the presence of land below or precipitation ahead.

  When pilots arrive at the threshold of an airliner, the airplane is almost always already powered, lit, and air-conditioned, drawing electricity either from the airport—the jet plugged in as simply as the toaster in your kitchen—or from an auxiliary engine in the tail.

  Sometimes, though, an aircraft that spends the night at an airport is completely depowered. On certain early icy mornings—in my memory such mornings have always been in northern Europe, in winter, when we reach the plane well before the first hint of sunrise—I have walked up to the jet and opened the door slowly, moving its surprising weight aside to the locked-open position. Inside there is total silence, the stygian feel of the inside of a snow-covered car, and the same sense that the vehicle is cold and unprepared for the scale of its intended motion.

  I then make my way to the dark cockpit, to begin to work through the airplane’s first checklist by flashlight. This activates some of the aircraft’s most critical functions, those that are hardwired to the batteries. They are the first systems the plane powers and the last things it would relinquish, as a body prioritizes blood to the brain. It is as though we are discovering an alien spaceship, perfectly functional, and slowly, line by line from a manual, re-conjuring its evident brilliance centuries after it was abandoned.

  Next I start the auxiliary engine at the back of the plane. It takes only a minute or two, but it always feels much longer; I do not have many attempts before the battery would be drained entirely. Success, when it comes, is a series of auspicious flickerings in the cockpit and down the passenger cabin, as systems activate, lights turn on, cooling fans begin to whirr, screens flash and go blank, bleached colors appear on them and slowly turn true. Many components begin to test themselves; warnings arise, then quickly clear. Electrons begin to flow through the nerve wires, hurrying light to the distant wingtips or returning with news of the quantity of fuel onboard or the present outside temperature, as the plane awakens to its purpose.

  —

  My father’s geographic circumstances—born and brought up in polyglot Belgium, sent to work as a missionary first in the Congo and then in Brazil, finally immigrating to America—meant that he was required to study and work in a variety of languages. The way he spoke of each—their intricacies, joys, and eye-rolling quirks—was similar to how pilots talk about various aircraft types they have flown.

  It’s often assumed that an airline pilot can fly any kind of airliner. Pilots typically take a set of exams, both in classrooms and in the air in small planes, to obtain a series of licenses that culminate in a general air-transport license. Then we obtain a type rating, a separate license to fly one specific kind of aircraft, such as a Boeing 747, or perhaps a series of aircraft designed with similar cockpits for exactly this purpose. A type rating involves a course of several months, including classroom and simulator training, as well as actual flying. When we switch to a new aircraft, the new type rating replaces the old one, and usually we are no longer permitted to fly the previous type. Some pilots fly a dozen types or more in their career. I may fly only three—the smaller short-haul Airbus airliner I started on, the Boeing 747-400, and probably one new type, between the 747’s retirement and my own.

  Much of the day-to-day professional knowledge we must maintain is specific to our aircraft type. We spend much of each day, or night, inside it; when we sit down, it will feel like a second home. Our connection to this aircraft will even color our experience of travel as a passenger. When I fly as a passenger on the Airbus, which I flew before the 747, it has the familiarity that alienates, like walking past a restaurant where you broke up with someone long ago. In contrast, when I fly on a 747 as a passenger I feel a peculiar comfort or satisfaction that is something more than knowing what the various noises mean.

  The bond between a pilot and their current type of airplane is hard to pin down. Language, as my father’s sense of languages reminds me, is perhaps the best analogy. Indeed each aircraft type or family has its language, or at least its own dialect, and analogous devices and procedures often have different names on different aircraft. Acquiring these words and their correct usage is a significan
t part of the work we put into a new type rating. In a phenomenon called type reversion, a pilot inadvertently refers to a term or procedure from a previous aircraft type. There is a friendly rivalry between the pilots of Boeing and Airbus aircraft, which in addition to everything else are two competing realms of language. On the Airbus, the fully stowed position of the flaps is called flaps zero. On the 747, the same position is called flaps up. Once, soon after I switched from Airbus to Boeing, flying with a senior captain, I mistakenly asked him to select flaps zero. Before moving the flaps he turned to me, with a clearing of the throat and a smile—from over the glasses resting halfway down his nose—that said: What are these youngsters coming to?

  In terms of technical knowledge, a type rating is not nearly as permanent or deep a distinction as a specialization in medicine, but perhaps it’s similar to the study and practice of a particular technique of surgery or imaging within a specialty. Law may be analogous, too, in a country divided into different jurisdictions that may require separate licensing—individual states, for example. Emotionally, a pilot’s relationship to their type is perhaps similar to how some people respond to a prized car they have owned for a decade or two. But different cars are not as different to drive as different airliners are to fly, nor do they exclude other cars from your driving life.

  Many pilots don’t get to choose their particular aircraft. They may even work for an airline that has only one type, for example. But in many airlines, pilots have some choice as to what airplane they fly, an opportunity that often arises when their company orders a new aircraft or retires an older model.