Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot

by Mark Vanhoenacker

  In weather forecasts in the American West you sometimes hear the term snow line or snow level, followed by an altitude; this is the horizontal division of the sky where snow turns to rain, a term and concept that makes particular sense from above. The snow level appears on the mountains, like the waterline against the depth marks of the side of a ship—a calendar, a slide rule that descends in winter and rises in spring. Often I land in a city in snow and walk through it that night, or the next bright morning, a city transformed, and it occurs to me that the snow and I descended together. At other times we fly through snow but land in rain in a place without mountains, crossing the snow level that weather forecasters would enumerate, if only there were hillsides here to reflect it. For those who like snow as much as me, it’s a pleasure to imagine, when seeking shelter from a cold winter rain, that not too far above me a blizzard may be raging.

  At night, mountains without snow are shadows on shadows. But snowcapped mountains glow even in starlight and in moonlight they come alive as vividly as cumulus clouds do—ghostly cones, divine blankets cast silently over unseen forms. There are mountainous lands such as Afghanistan and Pakistan that I have seen almost exclusively at night, their snowcapped highlands striped with zebra-like dark valleys where snow has not fallen or has already melted. Even flatlands show a pleasingly different face when covered in snow. When I think of Minnesota, for example, I think first of flying over it at night in winter: steady glowing cities luminous on the snow, under the moon and stars, a land and season that are never truly dark.

  Heavy snow, especially at night, greatly impedes our ability to see ahead, so much so that, as in fog, controllers may issue visibility reports from the transmissometers on the runway, and automatic landings may be required. In the first part of the descent the airplane’s strobe lights illuminate the composition of the storm, the way a flashbulb spotlights faces in a dark and crowded room. Each flash locks the snowflakes, lifted in the wind and racing past the plane at hundreds of miles an hour, into a seemingly impossible still image, a frozen moment in the inner life of a blizzard.

  Later in the descent the steady, forward-facing landing lights may be turned on and so the flashing, time-freezing effect of the strobe lights is diminished. Unlike rain, which appears from nowhere on the surface of the windows, if we see it at all, snowflakes in these beams appear as actual objects, as a new storm of spotlit ghostly flakes that fly continuously toward and over us. And so it is snow that gives us the rarest glimpse of the aircraft’s true speed. Snowstorms, after all, are the only time visible objects are so close to us in flight. The racetrack pace of the streaming snow is like nothing so much as the graphics used to indicate fast travel in science-fiction movies—stars that motion turns to perfect white lines across the darkness.

  Sometimes above Canada we see temporary ice roads, drawn over frozen bodies of water for vehicles and their brave drivers to cross. The ice roads often form straight lines, and the eye, surveying an hours-long chaos of wilderness, is instantly drawn to the unnatural sight of anything straight. They often mirror the contrails a jet draws above them in the sky, which like ice roads are straight and identifiably man-made, at least until the wind starts to work on them.

  Once, in Helsinki in midwinter, a captain and I walked down to the quiet waterfront in a blisteringly cold wind, because a waiter had told us that even on such a frozen night the ferries were still running, and neither of us had ever been on an icebreaker. In the nearly subarctic darkness we boarded the ferry bound for Suomenlinna, the great island fortress in the city’s ice-caked harbor. The vessel was as quiet as the city. We told the captain we were pilots and without a smile or a word he motioned us to ride with him in the wheelhouse, from where we watched the nearly empty ferry bump through the jet-black water, casually knocking car-sized chunks of ice that tumbled off to the left or right of our course. Visually, the effect was similar to a flight among cumulus clouds, but one jarred by the distinctly un-vaporous thumps of solid ice that the bow cast aside. It was easier, the ferry captain said, to follow the trail he had forced earlier than to make a new one. The marbled path through the solid white was the inversion of an ice road; it was a trail broken in water.

  Later that winter on a clear day I passed to the south of Helsinki, over the Gulf of Finland, en route to St. Petersburg. I saw from high above the ferry-cut paths similar to those we had seen in Helsinki’s harbor, but on a much larger scale. The ice-crumbled highways running in lazy arcs through the frozen sheet of the gulf were left by large Baltic ferries. The lines formed a life-sized chart of the ferry routes; they had exactly the shape and perfect sweep that you might see on maps of early undersea telegraph-cable routes or of the idealized paths between cities that appear in the back pages of an airliner’s on-board magazine.

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  The over-the-top truth of great circles means that planes routing between otherwise balmy cities—Tokyo and Atlanta, Dubai and Los Angeles, flights on which no one has brought winter gloves—typically cross over the far north. The congenital chilliness of great circles is apparent in the southern hemisphere, too, though far fewer airliners ply them. Once in Buenos Aires, between flights from and to São Paulo, I saw another 747, bound for Australia. The captain and I, both far more accustomed to the geographies and routings around the opposite, north side of the planet, made a bet about whether the so-called straight line between Buenos Aires and Sydney, such famously sultry metropolises, reaches Antarctica. It nearly does.

  As autumn turns to winter an enormous portion of North America and North Asia, where many long-haul pilots spend much of their workday, falls into whiteness. For pilots as well as for passengers, these hours over this cold realm—on an entirely routine flight between the worlds known as Los Angeles and Paris, for example—are an opportunity few of us will otherwise have to meditate on temperatures and places we will never stand in. The room-temperature cabin of the plane arcs over lands and seas masked entirely by the white that Melville described in Moby-Dick—of the whale but also of polar bears, and ghosts, and horses of legend, and the “vast archangel wings” of the albatross—a whiteness that was “the monumental white shroud” of Arctic lands, or the “phantom of the whitened waters” that brings forth “a peculiar apparition to the soul.” A whiteness, in other words, as with that of clouds, that is reason enough to reach for my sunglasses.

  My father once remarked that growing up in Belgium, it was possible to discern whether someone was from only a village or two away by their accent. When I fly over a populated, temperate part of the world, it is easy to look down at the kinds of vegetation, and the terrain, and to imagine that—at least before modern nation-states and their education systems—languages once flowed gradually from place to place, changing as naturally as ecosystems, words leading on to words. In aviation we speak of isobars, lines of constant air pressure on a map; isotachs, lines of constant wind speed; and isogons, a general term that we most often use for lines of constant magnetic variation. An isogloss is the geographic boundary of a characteristic of language—the borderline of the natural range of a word, an accent, a feature of syntax.

  Flying over the populated realms of Europe or Asia, I may look down and ask what the language is here; how words and sounds change as this land rolls into another. Sometimes the question is answered. We hear the accents of controllers change as we switch from London controllers to their Scottish or Irish colleagues; as we cross between Quebec and the rest of Canada; when we cross the U.S.-Canadian border, and then when we move across the United States, especially from north to south. But over the remote parts of the far north—places uninhabited, or inhabited so lightly that such inhabitation is as invisible on the land as in the modern imagination—this visually inspired question about the sound of a place does not arise, and the controllers we speak to from over such places may themselves be very far away.

  Occasionally there are names to hear, the beacons of small places or geographic features that we can scarcely discern in th
e white. Once, over Siberia, I saw a river, its motion frozen whole upon the land. At home I looked it up; it was the Lena, from which Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov is said to have taken the alias Lenin, as if Lincoln or Churchill had adopted some version of Mississippi or Thames. Spring leaves unexpected marks on Siberia. The southern portions of the rivers melt first, but many of them flow north, toward the ice dams, where the river has not yet thawed. Spring piles up; the liquid season floods the land.

  Climate scientists, who have the best reasons to look down at the realms of cold water, may rely not on satellite photographs but on more specialized, satellite-imaging tools to fully distinguish clouds in the sky from ice in the sea. From airliners, the challenge they face is obvious. Often the sea off the Labrador coast of Canada will be filled with chunks of ice so numerous, and so small from the height of an airliner, so hauntingly gathered and conducted by what looks as if it must be an aerial force, that their pixels run together to form yet another kind of cloud. Only when you look closely might you see that the bleached curves and contours of these surface nebulae are composed not of clouds but of tiny imperfect discs of ice, swept along as if they were nothing larger than flecks of dried house paint scratched from your hands into the kitchen sink.

  Sometimes you see a line of blue cut straight through such a cloud of ice on the sea, and you follow it with your eye, certain that so true a course must end in the shining steel of something man-made—an icebreaker, surely? Yet the blue trail concludes not with a ship but with a large iceberg. So much of an iceberg’s volume is underwater that the winds that gather and guide the streaming puzzle pieces of sea ice may barely move the berg that parts this surface flow; and so the iceberg slices or casts a kind of ice shadow of open blue water behind it, a jarring exhibit of the superficial, cut cleanly by depth.

  I’ve heard many pilots say that their best-loved sight in all the world is Greenland, which long-haul pilots overfly regularly on routes from Europe to western North America. We reach this most dramatic of coasts three or so hours into a flight between Europe and western North America. The overcast skies of Scotland and Iceland have usually cleared; indeed, the clouds often vanish just as we approach Greenland’s eastern, all-but-vertical shore.

  On our screens, on our terrain display, the snowy mountains of the Greenlandic coast grow in digital splendor not long before they appear in the window, rising from the ocean like a skyline approached from across a harbor.

  The ocean waters that run up to these hundred coastal Switzerlands may be sheet-white, frozen solid, or a liquid, neon blue. Amid the sea ice, or alone in the open blue, are white constellations of newborn icebergs. I like to imagine what we are too high to hear: the thunder of icebergs calving from the glacier’s flowing edge; the rolling roar of the new icebergs’ sudden overturning; the steady drip of melt from overhanging edges onto the sea, the unlikely percussion of the rain that falls more heavily in sunlight. Some icebergs are so vertically dramatic that even from a cruising airliner you can see their rising shape, and they are tall enough to shadow themselves; the fraction of them in the air alone is enough to remind us that berg means mountain. Hours later, sitting quietly at a desk by the open window of a warm and sunset-lit California hotel room, confounded by the memory of the ordinary lunch I ate over Greenland, I may look up the names attached to the world I cannot quite believe I overflew: fast ice, second-year ice and tide cracks; nilas, ice keels and polynyas; the settlements known as Ilulissat, Upernavik, Thule.

  We will never see the water gyre of the planet as clearly as we do from above Greenland. Sometimes the skies are clear over the glaciers flowing through the coastal mountains, while low cloud lies over the open water where the glacier ends and we see only a continuity of white streaming down the fjord, which along some blurred line transitions from a river of ice to a river of cloud. Further in on the inland ice we see the sapphire eyes of melt pools that run out to rivers the color of the sky. If the skies are clear over the ocean, too, then we see icebergs beginning their journeys across the blue that will be their end, and no end at all.

  Though Greenland has the form of a bowl of mountains, often we see little of the rock rim itself. Here at the edge of the bowl the Platonic angles of the cloud-swirled peaks are nearly pure folded snow, so much snow and so little rock that we perceive the land only as degrees of light, as a planetary drawing class on advanced techniques of shading; as crumpled pages of white earth smoldering in incendiary sunlight. And this is all, really, that the eye demands of a mountain: white shadowing white, the snow’s idea of height, gracing the twinned voltaic blues of the sky, and the ice-clouded sea. We say we love the sight of this place, this land above all others; yet all we see is water.

  Encounters

  I’m in my midtwenties, on a business trip for my consulting company; there are several years to go yet before I’ll become a pilot. The first plane ride I can remember was a family trip to Belgium, when I was seven. Now I’m further than ever, it seems, from that wide-eyed boy: I have a laptop and a stack of freshly printed business cards, in different languages on each side, and a garment bag filled with the suits I’ll need on this long journey away from my office.

  I can’t decide whether to ask if I can visit the cockpit. From childhood through my college days, I regularly asked to do so. But since starting work, I’ve made such requests much less often. Partly it’s because my colleagues and I often have to work on the plane, or we try our best to sleep before the meetings that are waiting for us in the morning after we land. Perhaps I also fear that my eagerness about airplanes might come off as unworldly or unprofessional.

  Still, this business trip is special to me. It’s part of a journey that I’ve pondered for weeks in advance, poring over an atlas in the apartment I share in Boston. I will think of this trip for years to come, whenever I see an image of the earth from space or encounter a photograph of my bedroom as a child that includes the globe I owned then. The journey I’m on runs from Boston to Japan, where I will stay for several weeks, then on to Europe, and finally back to New England. I’m flying around the world.

  The industry I work in, management consulting, is known for asking candidates for employment questions to which they probably will not know the answer, in order to see how they reason their way to a sensible guess. “How many trees are there in Canada?” is such a question, and one that in subsequent years I will have no shortage of time to ponder during flights over that country’s boreal forest. In my own interview I was asked to estimate the number of violins in America, so I thought about how many violinists there were in my school, a figure I then tried to scale up to the country. Once, when I myself conducted such an interview, I asked a candidate to estimate the percentage of the world’s population that had ever been on an airplane (roughly 80 percent of the U.S. and UK populations have flown at least once; worldwide, there are no statistics, but I suspect the portion of humanity that has flown is well under 20 percent—the percentage, incidentally, of Americans who had flown in 1965).

  Another such question might be how many people, in all of human history, have traveled around the planet? This elemental motion, from home back around to home, returning without turning, remains rare among even the most seasoned air travelers—rare among even pilots.

  Now I am flying the long middle leg of this journey, between Tokyo and London, on a 747. Before we boarded I could not hide my excitement. Even last night on a high floor of a hotel in the Shinjuku area of the city, when I looked out at the darkening sky over the lightscape of a city that is like no other, it was London as much as Tokyo that was on my mind; twelve hours in the air, 6,000 miles, from one island nation’s great metropolis across nearly all of Asia and Europe to another’s.

  We’ve been flying for maybe five hours now. The world outside is entirely white. Land, not cloud, I think, but I can’t be sure. We’re somewhere over Siberia. I have never been over Siberia, and most of the other passengers are sleeping, their blinds closed against a day they won’t
even think about beginning to end until hours after we land in London. The next time one of the flight attendants passes me, I close my laptop and ask if it might be possible to visit the cockpit. She returns a few minutes later. Come with me, she says with a smile. I follow her upstairs. It’s the first time I’ve ever been in the cockpit of a 747; it’s the first time I’ve ever been upstairs on an airplane. I would not believe it if anyone told me that not so many years later I would fly this very plane between these same two cities.

  The flight attendant introduces me to the pilots, who invite me to sit down. One of the copilots asks me about my work, but I’m much more interested in talking about his. He describes the challenges of long Siberian flights. He points out the magenta string of our route, arcing up to the top of a navigation screen. He shows me weather reports that print like receipts from the center console, enumerating the all but otherworldly temperatures of some of the Russian cities we are flying near. He talks with a combination of amazement, amusement, and acceptance about the peculiarities of the days and nights of a pilot’s life—the oddly casual sense of going to Tokyo for the weekend; the challenges of managing rest before, during, and after such a journey; the vagaries of light, the twenty-four hours everyone on this plane will have between dawn and dusk, a dilation of our shared day over a fair portion of the earth’s landmass. The captain shows me the printout of his schedule, folded and stored inside his cap, a tradition I’ll adopt myself years later. The codes and times on this sheet tell him that a week from now he’ll be in Cape Town, then Sydney ten days after that. Twenty minutes or so later, aware that my enthusiasm might lead me to overstay my welcome, I reluctantly thank them and excuse myself.