Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot

by Mark Vanhoenacker

  When a pilot needs to express a preference, perhaps the weightiest consideration is the distance a plane typically flies. Some pilots prefer shorter flights because they find the busy starts and ends of flights the most professionally satisfying, and the shorter each flight, the more takeoffs and landings pilots will perform. Such pilots may also fly more short round-trips that bring them home each night, rather than to hotel rooms far away. “I’m a proud flat earther,” I’ve heard more than one pilot joke, to emphasize that they would never give up short-haul for long-haul flying.

  Pilots tend to like powerful planes. I’ve often heard complaints about one long-retired aircraft type that pilots felt was under-powered; the joke was that it only ever got airborne because the earth eventually curved away beneath it. In contrast every pilot I’ve talked to who has flown the Boeing 757 has mentioned, unprompted, how powerful its engines are. But equally often I hear wide-eyed pilots marvel at the efficiency of a new airplane, after they compare the amount of fuel burned between an older and a newer, more efficient aircraft on the same route.

  The differences in the cruising speeds of airliners are small. Still, some airplanes and their pilots spend their hours in the sky habitually overtaking others. It feels good—how could it not?—when you are pulling ahead of other aircraft even while maintaining your most efficient speed.

  Size is a more complicated question than speed. On a small plane there may be two pilots and three or four flight attendants; on a long-haul airliner like a 747 there may be four pilots and fourteen or more flight attendants. It’s much easier to get to know colleagues when there are fewer of you; and on a larger plane not only are there many more crew but there is also the matter of the greater physical distance between the pilots and those who are busy working far from the cockpit. Smaller planes can also feel more maneuverable, sportier. I once asked a pilot who flew a small regional jet how he liked his aircraft. His eyes lit up; it was, he said, better than surfing.

  Still, it’s my impression that more pilots prefer longer routes, and therefore the larger planes that typically fly them. One reason is the chance to see further-flung cities and countries and to flee your home weather, or indeed the entire season of your home hemisphere, for something more to your liking. Long-haul pilots also tend to have more free time at their destination, because the amount of rest required is greater when a flight is longer or crosses more time zones. And a nearby city linked to yours by small planes may be fascinating to you, or it may not be very different at all from the world you already know well. But a city that calls planes to it from far across the planet must be in some way globally prominent—particularly beautiful or beloved or enormous.

  I enjoyed my years on a smaller plane. But among those short flights I always liked the longest ones best, and I knew that I wanted to spend at least a portion of my career on a large aircraft. I’ve been stuck since I was a child, I think, on the idea of flying far, over varied landscapes, to the biggest cities on earth. Saint-Exupéry is often credited with saying that he flew “car cela libère mon esprit de la tyrannie des choses insignifiantes,” because “it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.” Releasing my mind from traffic or the line at the bank is easier, certainly, when I know that in the coming hours a quarter of the world, many distant countries of cloud, will move across the windowpanes.

  Some pilots have the opportunity to try both short-haul and long-haul flying during their career, to find what they love best, or to follow their preferences as they change throughout a long career. The luckiest pilots will fly an aircraft or aircraft series that covers both short- and long-haul routes; within a single month they may experience a wider variety of routes and places than many pilots will in a lifetime. Flight attendants, too, have training specific to aircraft types, but they often hold several such certificates at a time. This means they can fly to the destinations covered by multiple types of aircraft; in this way their world is much larger than that of any of the pilots they fly with.

  Some pilots joke that the appearance of their plane does not matter to them, because they are looking out from the inside of it. Still, the aesthetic qualities of airplanes are a regular topic of contemplation and conversation. Pilots might say that one airliner looks right, or that another looks—vaguely, but definitely—wrong. Or that one plane looks as though the engineers kept sticking bits on, seeking a frustratingly elusive aerodynamic solution, each design amendment then requiring another; whereas other planes look good from the start. Pilots will often remark on a new plane when they see it for the first time, puzzling over whether it looks awkward only because it’s new, or because its appearance is genuinely unfortunate. We may ask an older colleague how an old and much beloved plane looked to them when it first landed decades ago.

  Often a manufacturer will lengthen or shrink an existing airplane type. Aesthetically, a lengthening is generally an improvement, while a foreshortening is risky. Imagine the leverage that’s added by the long handle of a tool—a screwdriver, for example, that you use to pry off the lid of a can of paint. Similarly, the longer a plane, the longer the arm the controls on the tail of the plane can act along, and therefore the smaller the required size of the tail. This is one reason, if a plane is shortened, the tail may not shrink along with the fuselage; it may even grow, and look markedly ill at ease.

  Occasionally one airplane catches the imagination of pilots and cabin crew, or even of the general public. More than a few colleagues told me they decided to learn to fly only because they wished to fly the 747. I am never surprised when a colleague’s e-mail address contains some version of those famous numbers. I occasionally go to an exercise class near the hotel I stay at in Vancouver—exercise is sometimes the best antidote to long-haul travel, whether because it resets the body’s clock or only tires you out into sleeping better, I do not know—and the instructor will often sing out, at the start of a pose in which we are lying on our stomachs but lifting all our limbs: “Lift your arms, lift your shoulders, like a 747 taking off.”

  Recently I was taxiing a 747 past a portion of the tarmac at San Francisco that was closed off for reconstruction. More than a dozen airport workers, though presumably already accustomed to the sight of airplanes at close range, nevertheless put down their tools to photograph us. On one summer evening when I was flying near sunset over the Netherlands a different aircraft type passed over us, and the other pilot let out an aerial catcall to our 747, a low whistle over the radio, then: “I hope you have a lovely day on that lovely aircraft.”

  Partisans often say that the 747 jet “just looks right.” I agree, but this isn’t necessarily what you’d think of a plane with such an unnatural bump (a design that moved the cockpit upward and back, to permit an up-swinging cargo door to be fitted to the nose). The lines of the 747 may be so satisfying not despite this nose bump but because of it. Perhaps it recalls a natural relationship—that of the head of a bird, a swan perhaps, to a long body and wide wings. Joseph Sutter, the 747’s lead designer, was drawn to birds as a child—eagles, hawks, ospreys. He might be pleased to know that his achievement has come full circle, that a writer on the wildlife of Virginia has described the great blue heron as the “747 of the swamp.”

  Other differences between aircraft are so small in the context of such earth-crossing, mile-vanquishing vessels that it feels ungrateful to dwell on them. Airbus cockpits are beloved for their foldout tables, an enormous enhancement to the pilot’s quality of life when completing paperwork or a meal; I also found the cup holders and sun visors were more intuitively located on the Airbus. Some planes have windows that open, a blessed feature when you’re dining in the cockpit between flights and wish to feel the breeze on your face, especially if you have flown from somewhere cold to somewhere warm and have only three-quarters of an hour until you must fly home to the cold. Some airplanes have a bathroom inside the cockpit; for this reason the 747 is often called the en-suite fleet. (When I first started to fly 747s, the cockpit lavatory, a stand
ard airplane fitting, contained a most unlikely feature: a baby changing table that was only later removed to save weight.) Many long-haul planes have pilot bunks. On some airplanes you have to pass through the passenger cabin to reach the bunks or lavatories; on others, like the 747, you need never leave the cockpit area and can move freely between the bunk and the bathroom in your pajamas.

  The best proof that the temperature outside is really as polar as the cockpit gauges indicate is the floor of the cockpit. It can be like ice. Some aircraft have foot heaters and some do not. When I flew Airbus jets that were not equipped with them—my understanding is that they are an optional extra, like those a car salesman might offer to throw in during the last minutes of negotiations—I would sometimes wear heavy socks for unusually long flights. I would be in a hotel in Bucharest, in the baking height of a continental summer, thinking of the sphere of cold above even the warmest times and places as I pulled ski socks onto my feet. The 747 has foot heaters. The frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean looks better—everything looks better—when your feet are warm.

  Aside from foot heaters, new technology plays a perhaps unexpected role in the preferences of pilots. When I worked in management consulting, I had the sense that everyone wanted the most advanced tools—laptops, projectors, phones. Planes, like computers and smartphones, differ in the level of technology they incorporate. Some pilots are early adopters, gravitating to the newest equipment. But it’s quite common for pilots to strongly prefer older aircraft. One reason is that in such aircraft, in which fewer tasks are automated or computerized, many pilots feel closer to the simplest mechanics of flying and an older ideal of their profession. Each new generation of aircraft lays down another stratum of technological sediment between the modern pilot and the Wright brothers, and the pace of technology is such that some pilots may fear that once they leave a more traditional aircraft type, they will never again have a chance to exercise their skills in the same way.

  When visitors clutching the latest smartphones come into the cockpit of the 747, they are often so shocked by its relative antiquity that they can’t help but comment on it. Many pilots take such a reaction as a compliment, and joke that “it’s a classic” or “it’s steam-driven but we like it that way,” while resting their fingers affectionately on the four stilled throttles.

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  If the now-familiar form of an airplane still holds the modern eye, it’s perhaps because it holds opposites.

  The routineness of air travel today, the sometimes-weary casualness with which many passengers fly, contradicts the physical grace of airliners. Yet in science-fiction movies, when the music rises and we glimpse a craft that is more poetry than machine, a shimmering vessel perhaps without an obvious means of propulsion, it is the cultural and visual lines of airplanes that filmmakers call upon, rather than actual spacecraft, most of which have no need to be aerodynamic and are therefore unattractive.

  There is also the size of an airliner, set against its breathtaking reserve of speed. A large airliner, the consummate elider of place, itself possesses the scale of a structure or enclosure we might work in or inhabit. Sutter, the 747 designer, remarked that his airplane was “a place, not a conveyance,” one that an architectural magazine would describe as the most interesting edifice of the 1960s and that the architect Norman Foster would name the twentieth-century building he admired most. Yet this building, this place, moves nearly as fast as sound itself.

  Then there is the airplane’s solidity, the metal heft of it, so incompatible with the ungraspable medium it moves through. We speak of a jet’s weight in shorthand—340 today for takeoff to San Francisco, 385 to Singapore tonight—and I am occasionally shocked to recall that the unit we do not bother to append to these numbers is metric tons. The 747, whatever its abilities to make light of the planet, is too heavy to stand on the tarmac of many of the world’s airports.

  A parked airplane also embodies contrarieties of place. At the airport gate a plane is immobilized, Gulliver-like amid the vehicles, personnel, and activities that surround it. Yet it retains something of the imaginative shadow it cast when it vaulted seamlessly from Singapore to London—on the Andaman Sea, Delhi, Kashmir, the snowy peaks of Afghanistan, the holy city of Qom, the Black Sea, Transylvania, Vienna, the banks of the Rhine, the cathedral of Antwerp, the lanes of the Channel. The stillness of a parked airplane holds all places; such groundedness suggests only its opposite. That, I think, is what I realized when as a kid I saw that plane from Saudi Arabia parking at Kennedy Airport, and what I came across again, in a limited but more close-up way, when I walked around a small plane before my earliest flying lesson.

  That first personal experience of inspecting an airplane I would help fly, as a wide-eyed teenager following an instructor around that small plane, has proved to be a constant in my flying career. Even for the largest airliners the tradition remains that before each flight one of the pilots will descend to the tarmac to inspect the aircraft exterior. This is colloquially called the walk-around.

  The walk-around reminds me that the built world is composed of a hierarchy of machine-based, increasingly superhuman-scaled spaces. We know this, but we so rarely have a chance to consider this hierarchy directly from our appointed places within it. The walk-around is an opportunity to cross these boundaries. The pilot leaves the more or less friendly public part of the airport, with its windows and music and chairs and cafés, and transits both vertically and conceptually down to the working area of the field. The actual descent often takes place on metal stairs attached to the side of a jetway. The angle of the staircase may change as the jetway rises or falls, and so they are often at their most precipitous when reaching up to the high doors of a 747. These narrow and vertiginous steps—even when it’s not dark, wet, and windy out—are the only ones in the whole world on which I’m religiously careful to use both handrails.

  Rising noise marks the descent as steeply as the steps do. Sound floods over us the moment we open the heavy door to the stairs. Outside it’s a thunderous world, even when we’re wearing the required earplugs. People have no purpose or pleasure here, except to perform a specific task on an expensive and noisy machine, usually with the help of another expensive and noisy machine. From the stairs we move over the ground as we would cross the chaotic streets on our first day in a foreign city, relying on extreme caution, not the rules of traffic or the goodwill of drivers, to ensure our safety.

  The area around each gate is carefully marked, in paint as well as in the mental maps of all who work here. Inside this area, certain vehicles and people move relatively freely. The border of this area, then, marks another transition, to the taxiways. The taxiways are nearly a no-man’s-land, a world scaled not only for enormous machines but for those on the move. A pilot will often walk near the border between the gate area and the taxiway. If you have ever stood next to a wide, racing highway, you will know the same vague malaise of unbelonging—the feeling that you are only narrowly separated from a realm of bigger, faster, harder creatures, the opposite feeling of walking down a small European street. The teams that push back the plane are among the few who walk on the taxiways, and there are elaborate rules to protect them from moving airplanes.

  The taxiway—windswept, hard, vast—is alien in another sense. Here, it’s not tumbleweed that suddenly rolls past but a 230-foot-long, 400-ton aircraft, engines roaring. The passengers on planes taxiing out for takeoff have already left the humanly scaled world of the airport; indeed they have left the city, they have departed in all but the most physical sense. Faces you can hardly see in the blur of ovals provide the same flickering sense of others’ lives as you get through the window of a subway train that briefly parallels your own; the sight of someone already gone, the presence of absence.

  Back inside the gate area are many machines that do not fly. It becomes clear on a walk-around why toy airplane sets so often include many of the ground vehicles, the enormously varied ecosystem that swirls over each aircraft like a reef.
These vehicles and the staff they carry are busy here and now because the airliner will soon be inaccessible; they are doing what cannot be done later in the sky, which is to say everything. The term for an aircraft with a technical problem that prevents it from flying is AOG, for Aircraft On Ground; a term that precisely reflects the importance of minimizing the time between landing and takeoff.

  There are the trains of baggage containers, and the vehicles that load these into the plane; there is the tug or tractor—the necessarily heavy vehicle that pushes the plane away from the terminal. It is typically locked onto the nose wheel several minutes before departure, a steaming cup of coffee waiting for the driver. Most airliners, unlike almost every other kind of vehicle, cannot move backward on their own. This small but necessary reversal, the need to push a plane backward a few hundred feet before releasing it to move forward 6,000 miles, still strikes me as curious, as if the motions of airliners over the planet were as simple as that of toy planes that must first be pulled back along the floor.

  There are the catering vans, lifting high on their scissor-legged platforms, ready to deliver the meals you will eat hours and miles from here over some far country of cloud; there is the refueler, pumping 25,000 gallons or more of jet fuel into the wings, most of which will have been consumed by the engines before your pre-landing breakfast is served. Engineers may have parked their airport-confined cars nearby while they conduct their checks or repairs; other vehicles carry teams of cleaners, bags of blankets recently arrived or about to depart. One vehicle delivers water to the plane; another, sometimes referred to as the honey wagon, removes waste; one more may be rising skyward to scrub the cockpit windows or to wash ice from the wings.