Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot

by Mark Vanhoenacker

  As we flew we talked on the radio about the land below, or the barbecue that the other trainees were having that evening, or the movie we would go to see, and this bright connection over the blue—rather than air-traffic control or weather reports—suddenly seemed the purpose of radios, the reason radios were the first electronics installed on airplanes. Even as I flew I hoped I would not forget this, that early one winter’s day a new friend and I flew within sight of each other across the desert and talked about nothing in particular.

  It’s a day I remember whenever I am flying in an airliner and a friend’s voice suddenly joins the same radio frequency I am on. Our world-crossed schedules have brought us to what we could never have planned: to the same room of the sky. Occasionally I hear a friend descending to New York at the end of a flight from London, as I am climbing away from New York, as if we alone were personally charged with the maintenance of some unappreciated equilibrium between the two cities. When a friend appears on frequency, we don’t chat, but if it’s not busy I may dare a quick hello across this exclusive yet most public medium. I will almost never see their airplane or have any idea where they are. I will probably not even know where they are going. Then one of us will change frequency, leave without farewell, ships in the night.

  I am in the cockpit, flying from Vancouver to London. Only minutes after departure the city stops and the mountains rise. Thin veins of light run along the valleys below, as if a broad flat place had been folded and the lights had tumbled down the steep sides into the crease. Even these lights linger only in the climbing terrain, and then a world begins that looks much as if there were no people at all upon it. It is a sense that persists long across the night, across the taiga and the tundra and Greenland and several seas until landfall comes over Scotland. It is one of the loneliest routes.

  During one of the routine conversations over the intercom system that connects pilots to flight attendants on a large aircraft, one of the crew tells us that a colleague is weeks from retirement. In the slightly wearying game that will be familiar to flight attendants and pilots on big airplanes everywhere, we start calling the dozen-plus intercom stations dotted around the aircraft until we find her. We suggest that she might like to come to the cockpit for the landing in London and, after breakfast is served, she does. I am the heavy, the extra pilot today, so she and I sit behind the other two pilots as the hedgerows of the Chilterns scroll beneath our wings like the webbed cracks on an aged oil painting, erasing thoughts of yesterday’s dusk in Vancouver and the sunset embers on the icy peaks that guard the city we left. I ask if she has been in the cockpit recently for landing. No, she says, not recently. She mentions that she’s married to a former 747 pilot and that she hasn’t watched a landing from the cockpit since he retired a few years earlier.

  I ask if she and her husband were able to fly together often during their paired careers. She nods. We loved Cape Town, Singapore, Hong Kong, she says, with a smile. I think of the 747 we are in, of its eventual retirement and that of her husband, which has already taken place. Of hers soon and of my own some day, too.

  It occurs to me sometimes that a working life spent among so many colleagues, the teams that disassemble as cleanly as they formed, might be something people are glad to leave behind at the end of their career. I ask her if her husband misses his work. She answers while looking away, out of the window at the turn of England. Oh yes, she says, he does. He misses the people. I ask her if she means that he misses the many hundreds of fellow pilots he must have met in a long career, or the thousands of cabin crew, or his colleagues on the ground, or the passengers themselves. Oh, he misses all of them. Everyone, she laughs, looking left over Windsor as the runway rises ahead of us and the great wheels lower.

  —

  I don’t know many pilots from other airlines. On the radio, we rarely speak directly to one another; mostly we interact with controllers, although we do not know them really, either.

  A pilot may come to know the voices of the controllers at their home airport, even if it’s a busy place. Once I visited the control tower at Heathrow, and I was happy to put faces and names to the voices I had heard for so many years—the voices that to a pilot based there are as recognizable and welcoming a feature of home as Richmond Park or Wraysbury Reservoir, when after so many long hours over foreign places they sail past the cockpit windows of the homeward-descending jet. But I have never learned to recognize the individual voices of the controllers at any other airports or of the controllers who cover the airspace in between.

  Sometimes two planes fly the same route at the same time, separated from each other only vertically. Such planes may fly within close sight of each other for half an hour or so, until they are pulled apart by the differences in their speeds and the winds. I have occasionally heard one pilot tell another over the radio that they have taken a photo; they then exchange e-mail addresses. I like pictures of airliners well enough, but a picture of an airliner that I am myself flying, over the Atlantic or Namibia or the Andaman Sea, would be something else entirely, especially precious as a gift from another pilot I will never meet. I still have the photo my friend and training partner took of me in a small plane, when we flew together over southern Arizona.

  Often we know we are near other planes because even though we cannot see them, we can hear them talking on a common radio frequency, memorably enumerated 123.45. It’s used most often to advise other pilots about turbulence, though sometimes it’s used for jokes or to discuss something extraordinary we can all plainly see—a meteor shower, auroras, the striking proximity of Venus and Jupiter in the sky before an eastbound audience of up-all-night pilots crossing the dark waters of the Atlantic. If you have ever asked your crew to find out the result of an election or the score of a game that is in progress, they probably used this frequency. As Internet access spreads to the sky, such requests will be something that only pilots remember from a less-connected world.

  I heard a story once, that in the 1970s the British tax authorities briefly embargoed or placed a heavy duty on aircraft radios, thinking they were for entertainment. Sometimes a burst of music is played on 123.45; sometimes you even hear a passage of singing on this frequency, followed by a chorus of don’t-give-up-your-day-job jibes.

  I am over the North Atlantic, halfway to New York. At this stage in flight my communications panel, my box, is typically set to broadcast four separate audio streams into my headset: the shared frequency, 123.45; another frequency reserved for urgent matters not related to sports scores; the voice from the captain’s microphone; and the communication line to the cabin crew. It’s a cacophony that takes some getting used to. We are in the middle of the tracks, those imposing lines of wind-optimized North Atlantic routes published anew for the westbound and eastbound flights of each day and night above the ocean. The common frequency is mostly quiet. A pilot reports turbulence ahead, but we listen and hear that she is at a different altitude, on a different track.

  Suddenly I hear an American accent ask if a certain flight from another airline is listening to the common frequency. Yes, a French-accented male voice responds a moment later, we are here.

  The American pilot explains that his wife and daughter are on the French pilot’s plane. He asks if the French pilot could arrange for the crew to find their seats and tell them that he says hello, from not so far away in the sky. It’s rare on this frequency to hear anything other than clipped exchanges of aviation terminology, sports scores, and colorful banter. Surely everyone in this region of the sky, every pilot within several hundred miles, is now listening.

  The French pilot agrees. But the next voice on the frequency, a few minutes later, is not the French or the American pilot or any other pilot. It is the American pilot’s wife. The French pilot has invited her into the cockpit. He has given her a headset and told her that she can speak to her husband, from her airplane to his, though the two planes are not even in sight of each other. The American pilot responds instantly, half laughing, to her
voice ringing out to him—and to everyone else over a large circle of the Atlantic Ocean. In his whole life the spheres of home and work will never again meet this way, on a crackling electric bridge in the blue.

  —

  Whenever I read a reference to some new software that promises to connect us more easily to one another, I think about how such technology has changed the lives of airline crews, allowing them to stay in touch with home in a way that would have amazed our predecessors. But I’m also pleased by the thought of how airplanes combine a technical modernity with an antiquely physical power to connect. Other connections are little more than metaphors in comparison, mere shadows of the actual motion of one person to the city or table or arms of another, cities or tables or arms where almost always they would rather be.

  Airports are by definition emotional places. When I think back to the visits my mother made to London, for example, I may remember us in the British Museum or strolling through Green Park; but what I remember most is seeing her when the doors of the baggage hall at Heathrow opened. When my grandfather died, my father flew ahead of us to Belgium. My brother and I, still only teenagers, followed a few days later. As the two of us boarded the plane at Kennedy airport, on a trip that a week earlier we had no idea we would make, I realized for the first time that someone had meant to our dad what he meant to us.

  People fly for many reasons. But the calculus narrows considerably as calendars and circumstance close in upon a specific flight. The plane is a narrow channel between two lakes of place, a bottleneck between the sloshing social randomness of daily life in each of two distant cities. Sometimes this effect is extreme: there’s a conference, and half the passengers are computer engineers or physicists or archaeologists; or a large and raucous student group is traveling on perhaps their first-ever flight to a faraway place; or a group of elderly friends is flying out to Venice or Vancouver or Oslo together, to start the same cruise through some marvel of the world. On some routes, royalty feature regularly; on others, celebrities, oil workers, religious pilgrims, or aid workers may appear more often. I did not expect my work to reveal so clearly the circulations of humanity in this age, the spectrum of impulses, ancient and otherwise, that may direct someone today to set course across the planet.

  One reason I prefer to work on longer flights is that many passengers seem to share my own sense that such journeys are more momentous. On these flights people’s reasons for traveling are usually more compelling, almost by definition, because a longer flight takes more time away from one’s life and is typically more expensive. In the terminal, and on the aircraft itself before departure, it’s easy to sense the increased gravity of longer journeys, whether in the excitement of honeymooners, or just-retired couples, or even in the demeanor of the most seasoned business travelers, who, like their pilots, seem to draw out the act of settling into their seat in proportion to the number of miles they will spend in it.

  Among the many reasons passengers travel, I find the idea of emigration most moving. Perhaps because my father made such a journey from Europe to America, or perhaps because I reversed his great journey with one of my own. On most flights, I imagine, is a passenger who is going to a new country to live; maybe the first of their family, or to join those who have gone ahead. The courses of families, cascading down through the generations, hinge on such decisions, and also—in a small but particular and metallic way—on an airplane that once passed through the history of two places and one family.

  Pilots’ interactions with passengers are limited compared to those of the cabin crew, though, and so, too, are our understandings of the human weight of the journeys we make together. Pilots of bigger planes are most disadvantaged. Large planes may hold more passengers, but the pilots will probably see fewer of them. On my first flight on the 747 as a pilot I walked onto an empty jet and went upstairs to the cockpit. Three-quarters of a busy hour later the redcap told us that boarding was complete. She took her signed paperwork, shook our hands, and walked out of the cockpit, closing the door behind her. Of the 330 passengers onboard, I had not seen even one of them.

  Still, as with the connections I treasure to a few among my thousands of colleagues, there are exceptions. There are passenger visits to the cockpit before or after a flight, and not just by children. If you are interested, there is no reason not to ask. Occasionally pilots might be too busy before a flight, but afterward there is almost always time. Parents often take pictures of their children in one of the pilot’s seats, and no parent has yet declined my offer to take a picture of them in the seat, too.

  Sometimes I take guests into the flight simulator, which is the only way most nonpilots will ever witness the heart of my job and encounter a cockpit as it looks, sounds, and feels in flight. There is no more appropriate footnote to the simulator’s technical wizardry than its ability to also conjure up some of the most personal and memorable connections between passengers and pilots. Meanwhile it is the flight attendants who will interact with so many people, from so many cultures, onboard. When combined with the hours spent in more cities than almost anyone else on earth will visit—more, even, than many pilots, who will be confined to the destinations served by their sole current aircraft type—it is hard to think of a profession that offers a broader view of humanity.

  Occasionally a passenger becomes ill on a plane. In such situations, again it is the flight attendants, rather than the pilots, who make one of the deepest possible connections, in an often lifesaving reminder of the early links between nurses and flight attendants. (The Iowa-born Ellen Church, hired as the first female flight attendant in 1930, was a registered nurse, as were many of the first women who followed her, until the demands of the Second World War called many nurses elsewhere.) Pilots are involved in such medical situations only indirectly—flying faster, or calling for advice, or considering the option of landing before the destination. The calls for medical advice go via satellite to a central office where doctors evaluate patients on planes and boats in the most remote locations all around the world; virtual medicine at its most necessary. Occasionally the cabin crew seeks a doctor or nurse from among the passengers. Doctors are frequent travelers; I have never been on a long-haul flight on which we needed a doctor but couldn’t find one.

  A friend of mine who is an airline captain in the United States told me about his early flying days, when he flew small planes for whomever would pay him. Often he—alone, late at night—was tasked with flying a body, with flying someone home who had died while far away from it. This was in the time when banks always returned cashed personal checks to the person who wrote them, and so sometimes he would fly solo through the night with a cargo of one body and several bags of cashed checks. I remembered this story the first time I flew a plane with human remains listed on our paperwork. The additional, perhaps archetypal, sadness of dying abroad is still somehow present even in an age when someone who does so is likely to be repatriated. We do not have a name, or any other details, and perhaps nothing better symbolizes the connections and disconnections of the modern world, that such an important act should be so anonymous to those charged with it.

  Once I was in the cockpit of a flight about to depart, when an official car drove straight up to the aircraft, its lights flashing. The driver brought up to the cockpit what looked like a picnic cooler, containing, he told us, human corneas for transplant. The act was as anonymous as the carriage of human remains. We would never know anything of the donor or of the recipient and our role in the gift was entirely incidental. But since then, whenever I’ve confronted the idea of organ donation, on a driver’s license application or when my parents died, I’ve considered that flight and the persons for whom the corneas were destined, where they are, and how their sight is. I remember that we carefully strapped the box down in the cockpit, made our best speed for London.

  Among the many passengers I carry, occasionally I will know one. To fly a friend or family member feels peculiar when it is time to make announcements, to know tha
t one person in the cabin will hear my voice differently, that one person will hear my voice at all. And, they report afterward, the announcements sound equally curious to them. It is the same when friends see me in my uniform, when they are staying with me and I am about to leave for work or have only just returned. Their eyes skip between the face they know and the visual shorthand of my uniform.

  Once on a flight, I realized that a neighbor was among the passengers. She didn’t know I was one of the pilots. I went downstairs to say hello. I was surprised to find her in a seat over the Atlantic on a 747, rather than on the staircase of our building. Her expression, too, jumped from a blink of confusion to a smile, as I switched from the identically uniformed pilot she knew nothing of, to the neighbor she had so often cooked for.

  I am on a flight to Berlin. It’s been a long day; the captain and I have already flown from London to Madrid and back, and now it is night; soon we will start our descent to Tegel Airport, to our hotel, to bed. I make an announcement to the passengers about the fine weather waiting for us, and our arrival time, and the view that passengers on one side of the airplane will be able to enjoy of the city center on this clear night.

  A few minutes later, one of the cabin crew calls. A passenger who heard my announcement has told them he knows me. They have forgotten the name he gave, though, and so as we descend toward Berlin I have no idea who this could be.