Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot

by Mark Vanhoenacker

  The exact route of the walk-around is rigorously mapped in manuals. I begin near the nose, which is so high that I must move far ahead of the plane to see it. To view the plane head-on is to experience the aircraft as the air itself could be said to. From the front, an airliner looks like an animal—the cockpit windows like eyes, the cone like a nose or beak. A plane looks like a bird if you account for the wings, like an orca if you do not. The zoological imagery is reflected in both versions of the terminology used to direct planes as they push back from the gate—American controllers sometimes say: “Push, tail south,” while in much of the rest of the world the same instruction would be: “Push, face north.” Around the nose are probes that poke out and bend forward into the slipstream. They sense pressures, help calculate airspeed and altitude; their jaunty angles, their determined embrace of the slipstream, suggest nothing so much as a dog with its head out of a car window.

  The cockpit windows embody both technical rectitude and the more human aspects of aviation. Drone aircraft, as the poet James Arthur reminds us, typically have no need for windows, a disconcerting facelessness that perhaps more than their perceived autonomy explains why drones so often look like something out of a horror movie. On the ground at night, with the cockpit screens and the lights turned down very low so the pilots can see out clearly, the cockpit windows of a taxiing plane form blank panels, as dark as pupils. Before pushback, though, brighter lights may be on in the cockpit. Sometimes when I see the nose of a parked aircraft from a terminal, I marvel at its smoothed technical precision, and then I’m struck by the sudden sight of faces within it, the pilots in the windows, one turning or smiling to the other behind the thick glass. So I try to imagine this view of the pilots in flight, high over some distant land—the inaudible conversation, the cups of tea rising to lips behind aquarium-thick panes.

  The very first item on the checklist to be followed in the event of damage to a cockpit window—to make sure that our seat belts are fastened—is one that seems hardly necessary to have put in writing. The windows are heated to prevent ice from forming and to soften them, in order to better absorb the impact of birds. Such multilayered panes are a reminder of the days of open cockpits, and the sophistication of the facades we now so routinely craft to halt everything—birds, snow, hundreds of miles an hour of wind—everything but light.

  Though the convergence of the lines of the plane naturally draws the gaze of an observer toward the nose, it’s the wings that dominate the experience of the walk-around. The word wings still retains echoes of the divine, as if their simplicity and beauty might lead us to forget that we ourselves make them. We sculpt them and then we fuse them to a bus. There is only one pair of wings, of course, thanks to the French aviator Louis Blériot, credited with the creation of the first practical monoplane. Embedded in the wings, in the curve of the 747’s take on Blériot’s innovation, are powerful lamps known as landing lights. We might thank Blériot, who first made car headlights practical, for these as well.

  Whenever I look at a wingtip I like to think of the engineers and the years devoted to this pointed conjunction of design and air, where the wing gives way to the medium that breathes it to life. Such an apex should be marked with light, and so it is. Navigation lights, red and green, are arranged on wingtips as on the sides of a ship. A section in a manual describes the many exterior lights on the aircraft; it is a page I think of whenever I see blinking lights on top of radio masts or wind turbines or skyscrapers, how we mark the bodies and the endpoints of our creations.

  On some aircraft there’s a white light on the wingtip, visible from the passenger cabin; it catches the eye like a bright star that rises up on takeoff, to shine with us through the night.

  Just before takeoff on your next flight, let your eye mark the wingtip’s position—perhaps with the help of such lights—on a windowpane. What happens next is actually easier to observe when you can see a window but are not sitting adjacent to it. The wing starts to work even at low speeds. As the plane accelerates, the wing begins to rise. It works its magic first on itself—and the tips, where the wing’s labor vanishes into the wind that has conjured it, lift the most. Long before you are airborne the wings are claiming weight—their weight, your weight—from the wheels and the earth beneath them. It’s right to say that wings “soar.” They soar and pull us up. On many planes a line drawn between the tips of the wings in flight would pass well above the fuselage, which hangs in the bow they form.

  To walk under the wing is to square this upper moving marvel with its ordinary and static underside. The first surprise is the length. Passengers walk down the inside of the fuselage, but never from one wingtip to the other. The wingspan of a 747 is not far short of twice the distance covered by the first flight at Kitty Hawk. Such a structure, from underneath, is broad and wide enough to shade me, or to keep me dry if rain or snow are falling. Though sometimes, even on a hot day, there is fuel in the wing that has been deeply chilled during its previous flight—a cold-soaked wing. The wing may then shower melting frost on my cap or face. It has brought down the cold of somewhere high and far.

  Planes moving on the ground often remind me of large seals dragging themselves over a beach, in contrast with how elegantly they glide through water; or Olympic divers, when they heave themselves from the pool and clamber up a ladder, the inevitable tedium or inelegance that bookends their moments of grace. Underneath the wing and fuselage is the landing gear—what the plane stands on, when it must stand on the earth.

  Poets and engineers alike have remarked on the Wright brothers’ background in bicycles. At some airports, staff use bicycles to travel around the tarmac. Often I see one of these airport bikes parked, resting on its kickstand in the shadow of a 747, which with equal nonchalance is resting 350 tons on its eighteen wheels. Later, in the cockpit, I find myself thinking about my brother and I realize it is because I saw the bicycle, and I think of the latest bike he’s made for me; or I wish I had taken a picture of the one beneath the airplane, our two passions as proximate as they were for two brothers in 1903.

  Consider what happens when engineers face any decision that affects the weight of an aircraft. Let’s say, for example, that designers would like to install more substantial, homelike basins in the bathrooms—basins that happen to weigh a little more than the usual ones. Such a seemingly minor increase in weight in one small area may echo throughout the entire aircraft’s design. The heavier basins may require slightly stronger (and heavier) structures for the surrounding walls. To carry and maneuver this extra weight may require stronger (and heavier) wings and engines that burn more fuel. Such a dramatic rippling of compromises and consequences throughout the airplane is sometimes described as a gearing effect. By one calculation, the addition of 1 pound to an aircraft’s basic design results in a 10-pound decrease in the payload the plane can carry across the world.

  I like to think that one reason airplanes are so elegant is that, as with the exacting demands of aerodynamics, such a severe gearing effect acts as a kind of natural sculptor, a scalpel on the excesses that crowd on less weight-critical human creations, the excesses that we do not know to miss. The gearing effect also suggests the great importance of anything that is permitted to be heavy or obviously ungainly on an aircraft, such as the landing gear. The enormous metal stalks of the 747’s main gear legs, each as thick as a young oak, are an image of shameless brawn at the intersection between air and ground. The gear must bear much more than the weight of the plane; it must bear the impact of landing—in this sense it is an enormous shock absorber—and yet in the event of unusual stress it must break cleanly from the aircraft. It must hold the wheels and the heavy brakes, and allow them to cool. Yet even this heft swarms with sober intricacy, a wiry cloud of technical brilliances, hydraulic arteries, and the joints and appendages that allow the structures to raise themselves up at the flick of a cockpit switch so that a Swiss clockwork of complex paneling can close over them.

  The tires themselves are
so comically large—around 4 feet in height and a foot and a half in width—that perhaps only a child would size them correctly in a sketch. Each 747 tire may be rated to bear a load of 25 tons, as much as the monstrous tires of some earth movers, which do not have to land on them or hurtle down a runway on them. Often the speed limit of aviation tires—235 mph, for example—is written directly on them, along with “AIRPLANE,” as if to warn against the insult of their installation on a less exalted sort of vehicle. It is hard to imagine these wheels later, unchocked, unleashed, blurring to the speed of takeoff. As the wheels are retracted the brakes will bring this rotation to a halt, so much turning turned to the heat that will be carried for many hours across the high cold sky. The end of the flight brings the sudden return of speed. The wheels are not turning when they hit the ground, but must be spun up once again at touchdown, more or less instantly, to the speed of the flying earth. Long after parking, the rubber of the tires is often still warm to the touch.

  Walking around the aircraft wheels, I feel occasional gusts of the last flight’s heat, its enormous, braked speed, drifting off in the breeze. The shock of a jet engine, in contrast, is that it is already so cool. We may not often think of engines in day-to-day life; perhaps we take them for granted or find them dirty or low, as if they were a brief necessity during a former stage of history, that we had no choice but to cross in order to reach this age of information. But even now, in the realm of endeavor that we have named engineering, aircraft engines—comparably unconstrained by cost, sculpted by air—are among the most impressive creations. Clean-lined tubes of enormous, refined power, hanging from the stately wings of airliners, the everyday word engine—ingenium in Latin, meaning talent, nature, clever contrivance—catches in the light of its origin.

  Picasso—one of whose paintings would be onboard an airliner lost off Canada in 1998—used to address the French artist Georges Braque as “My dear Wilbur,” in an affectionate reference to the imagination and artistry of the Wright brothers. Marcel Duchamp, at an early exhibition on aviation, famously turned to Constantin Brâncus¸i and said: “Painting is finished. Who can do anything better than this propeller? Can you?”

  Aircraft propellers are beautiful things. It was the Wright brothers who realized they should be understood not as aerial versions of maritime propellers, but as rotating wings (indeed, airplanes and helicopters are sometimes distinguished by the terms fixed-wing and rotary-wing). Yet propellers have their limitations. The tips of the blade spin faster than the inner portions, a consequence of physics that explains the effectiveness of salad spinners. But when propellers get very large and fast and the blade tips approach or exceed the speed of sound, their efficiency declines dramatically.

  I have always been more fascinated by jets. To watch jet engines in flight is still a treat to me in the passenger cabin; especially from the rear cabin of the 747, where the scale of both the engines and the wings is most apparent. On the largest versions of the 777 the engines alone are comparable in diameter to the fuselages of many airliners. They conjure the speed that gives the wings life, that gives us flight. Yet they work without apparent motion or effort, unless you can see the turning fan, or unless you see the light from the setting sun fall on a portion of the wing, flickering and scintillating after it has passed through the churning column of thrust behind an engine. A jet engine at takeoff looks more or less the same as one shut down on the ground or sitting in the corner of a factory; a grace of engineering and air so purely channeled that the mechanism itself is all but unseen.

  The engines are identified in our manuals: three rotor axial flow turbofans of high compression and bypass ratio. First comes the gyral memory of watermills or crank-started motorcars, when we begin to turn the engine. Then, when the start cycle is complete, and the engines are stabilized at idle, we advance the thrust levers. At the front of the engines is the alloyed carnation of the fan. The blades stand as perfectly round as the dashed markings around the edge of a railway station clock. On airliners smaller than the 747 it is easy to reach the blades to check for ice, fingering their surprising backs, the unseen surface of the gleaming spokes. The excited five-year-old in me may give this fan a casual, affectionate whirl, and it is difficult, too, to believe how easily such a vast wheel can turn. The blades themselves are cool to the touch and, despite the name, are not sharp. On one version of the Airbus that I flew, the blades of the fan rattled when I spun it. Only at high speed would the blades hurl themselves out like the riders on a fairground ride, summoned by rotation to their appointed positions.

  The underwing location of the engines on most jet aircraft gives rise to one of the more curious aspects of flying them. Imagine a cardboard outline of the plane, loosely fixed to a bulletin board with a pin, free to rotate. If the engines are below the plane’s center of gravity—i.e., if they are hanging from the wings—then when power is added, the plane rotates around the pin. The nose rises, and the tail falls. This effect, the pitch-power couple, results in some counterintuitive flight maneuvers. For example, when we abort a landing and climb rapidly upward, we add power and pull back on the control column to bring the nose up. But as the thrust increases, as the engines spool up, the pitch-power couple quickly becomes so strong that we must reverse our inputs and start to push down on the control column even as we wish to continue climbing. This need to steer against power changes feels something like the steering torque that sometimes pulls a powerful car to one side when you accelerate rapidly. On some newer airliners the flight computers counteract the pitch-power couple automatically. Pilots on these aircraft must then in effect set aside one of the more eye-opening aspects of flying underwing-engined aircraft that they went to some trouble to learn.

  From behind the engine you can see the core, the engine within the engine. Core is the right word for these hidden and essential machinations. To be so close to the stilled engine is like visiting an empty stage before a performance or walking down the middle of an avenue temporarily closed to cars. Steinbeck wrote about how “the sound of a jet, an engine warming up” could induce the “ancient shudder” of his wanderlust. Here, up close, is what makes that sound; what, exactly, warms up. Once the plane takes off, the space immediately behind the engine will be flooded with unimaginable speed and heat, easily 900 degrees Fahrenheit, spinning out as if from a ship’s propeller into the icy vertical miles of nothing.

  When I first looked closely at airliners, I was struck to see that national flags sometimes appear in mirror image on them—so that on the right side of an airliner the block of stars on an American flag is in the top-right rather than the top-left corner, on an Australian flag the stars of the Southern Cross shine on the left rather than on the right, and on a Singaporean flag the crescent moon appears to be waxing rather than waning. The idea, which appears in other contexts, such as the shoulder patches of soldiers, is that this is how even an image of a flag should fly as a vessel sails forth.

  The sight of such flags is a reminder of the many ways an airliner answers to the air even before it moves. Often on a parked jet you find the blades of the engines are already rotating. Strong but light, built for air and the smoothest turning, they catch the slightest breeze and spin with the insistent nonchalance of a lawn mower. The things we have made, our air wheels that rest most easily in motion.

  From inside the terminal on a windy day, the depowered rudders—the vertical panels at the back of the tail—of a row of parked planes may all be hanging to one side, blown all in the same direction like the branches of a line of windswept trees. The tail, which looks like a sail, acts like one, too. To counteract a crosswind blowing from left to right as we accelerate for takeoff, we must steer not toward the left, as you might think, but toward the right; the wind catches on the vast tail and rotates the nose into the wind, a phenomenon known as weathercocking. If you board a plane on a breezy day, you may feel it gently rocking back and forth before you leave the gate. That is mostly the tail, catching the wind.

&nbs
p; Planes must occasionally be weighed, to ensure that calculations of the power required for takeoff, for example, are correct. This weigh-in takes place in a hangar, the doors of which must be kept closed, because even a light afternoon breeze on the wing will cause it to work a little, to soar ever so slightly, and tug the craft away from the scales of the earth.

  —

  It’s October 2007. About a month ago I flew my last flight on the Airbus. We pushed back from Newcastle at 09:22, and parked at Heathrow just under an hour later at 10:21. Below that line in my logbook I switched to a different plane and a different color of ink. In the weeks since that flight I started my 747 type rating and now I’ve completed the classroom training portion and various exams. Today I’m entering the cockpit of a 747 for the first time. But there’s only a cockpit. There’s no plane attached to it. It is a box, surrounded by banks of screens, perched on jacks in a cavernous room. This is a full-motion flight simulator. Today I start the simulator sessions; I’m virtually flying. My first flight on the real airplane is already scheduled, for about a month from now: London to Hong Kong.

  Though the simulator’s wraparound video screens do an admirable job of conjuring up the cockpit’s expansive views of the world, the simulator must also simulate the blindnesses that are a striking feature of flying a large airliner. The plane is so high, and the nose so rounded, that we cannot see anywhere underneath or immediately ahead of the plane. When we are taxiing, the knowledge that there is nothing under the nose of the plane in a given area comes solely through having seen that area before.

  From the cockpit we cannot see anything behind us. When giving taxi instructions, air-traffic controllers must take account of this. For example, they may ask us to inch forward to allow an aircraft behind us to make a turn, the kind of maneuver that might occur naturally between courteous drivers with their rearview mirrors. On some airplanes the pilots can see nothing of the wings. From my seat on the 747, I can see only one of the four engines and a small portion of one wing, and even these only with difficulty.