Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot

by Mark Vanhoenacker

  Because runways rarely align with the direction of a journey, an airplane makes many of its largest and most dramatic turns right after takeoff, when it is taking up its route, and not long before landing, when it leaves its route to align with the runway. Narita Airport is not far from the coast, to the northeast of Tokyo itself. On this bright morning the wind is from the north, so we make a clockwise series of turns around Narita, bringing us far to the south, over the water. This route takes us nearly over the airport, and below I see the exact spot where our airplane will reach the earth in fifteen minutes’ time; we are pleased to see that our gate is unoccupied. Such direct overflights of the runway we are due to land on are a reminder of the extremity of our speed and altitude, of our still-mighty energy. There is no pulling over on the side of the road to let someone out; the only way to get to the place directly below us is to fly away from it at several hundred miles an hour.

  In the last few miles before landing, airliners may follow a radio beam projected outward and upward from the runway. Pilots—or their autopilots—want to lock onto this beam, to follow it to the runway. Airliners generally approach the beam from a side angle, and because this angle, the wind and the speed of the airplane can all vary, the aircraft’s final turn to capture the beam can be quite gentle. This morning, though, the wind is blowing us across the beam, so the autopilot reacts with a much sharper turn, to avoid the aircraft being blown through the beam and out the other side. Such a turn, the last major turn before landing, is worth watching for from the window seat. Its apparent certainty and vigor, as the airplane and pilots seize onto the course that leads to the runway and the flight’s end, is as good an image as any of both aerial freedom and of the moment it is undone.

  Once I flew from Moscow to London late in the evening. Our flight had been delayed by heavy snowfall in Moscow, and when we arrived in the skies over London we were the sole remaining airplane bound for Heathrow that night. It was a flawlessly clear night over the city. Though we were still outside the M25, the ring road around London, we could already see the airport at the far side of that circle, across the city it encloses. We soon reported “visual with the runway,” though we were still more than 25 miles away. On such clear and quiet nights there’s no need to follow the beam through cloud or rain, no need for the complicated regime of speed controls that are typically applied to separate us from other inbound airliners at such normally busy airports.

  “Very well,” said the controller, when we reported we were visual. The instruction he was about to issue was a rare reminder to him and us of the smaller airports that both controllers and pilots train at. “You are cleared visual approach; free speed; all turns toward the airfield.” It was nearly midnight when we sailed over the lights of the capital in the direction of the light carpet of the runway. And just this once I came to one of the world’s busiest airports with a sense of freedom more familiar to pilots of a former age, returning from a late sortie to land on a grass strip, edged by a string of lanterns through the newly fallen darkness.

  —

  Most people I take into the flight simulator are charmed more by the experience of landing than of takeoff. Although at takeoff the runway dominates the windows, the destination is the vast sky above. Our eyes are drawn upward; they follow our intention as we move, in many senses, from the specific to the general. At landing this is reversed. The whole airplane, every mile of the flight, has been aiming at this country, this city and airport, but above all at this runway, a few miles northwest of Japan’s Pacific coast.

  The technologies that bring us to this point, to this sight of a city, still amaze me. We see the point from so far away. We see it, in essence, from the other side of the world, through fog and cloud and the skies of many countries; we see it not through the intervening rock but from far around the curve we will fly, from another day. Whenever I read that an example of tool use has been discovered in the natural world, some flicker of technology among another species, it suggests a continuum: from a sea otter pounding smartly with its rock to the airplanes that are guided across the world by the full light of our creations and in the last moments by our own eyes.

  Some people who dislike flying specify that what concerns them is the feeling of not being in control. Another reason, I suspect, is that they cannot see their direction of travel. If it’s not normal for humans to move so fast, it’s even less natural to see only sideways while doing so. Even on a train the windows are big enough to show more of what lies ahead. Today, on a typical single-deck airliner, the cockpit occupies the position where the sides of the fuselage curve around to the nose, so it is only the pilots who can see forward. But on the double-decker 747 the cockpit is upstairs, so the two passenger seats nearest the front of the lower deck do in fact offer a partial forward view. Their two occupants will be able to see something of Japan straight ahead this morning, to watch our return to the land not only below the plane but also in front of it, to arrive here as simply as we do.

  On most approaches we do not need to see the runway until the “DECIDE” call, in the last fifteen seconds or so of a flight, but usually we see it long before this, when the aircraft turns onto its final course or breaks from cloud. From far away a runway appears like a punctuation mark, a bracket tilting away along the ground. At first it looks so small, marked off as precisely and preciously from its surroundings as a painting on the wall of a museum seen from far across a room.

  When I’m first able to pick out the runway from the surrounding world, I may announce: “I’ve got it.” Occasionally I hear colleagues announce: “Land ahoy,” even if we have not been over the sea at all during the flight. But this is the most apt expression; from above, the edges of the runway mark off the only useful land in all the world. A few months before this flight to Tokyo I had landed in Vancouver, in an unexpected snow squall. For much of the approach there was no horizon to be seen, only the pattern of approach and runway lights hanging in the haze and tilting gradually toward us, as if we were sailing to the floating runway of a city in the clouds.

  Many airports, like Narita, have multiple runways, and then the whole complex, lifting toward us, looks like a city itself, which the largest airports practically are. Approaching an airport with parallel runways, all sensibly aligned to the wind, is like approaching a city on an interstate that is getting busier and busier and suddenly noticing a barrier with, just beyond it, another set of lanes going in the same direction. Often passengers will see other aircraft paralleling their own plane’s path, while on the wide roads below vast streams of lives and vehicles are heading toward a tower of clustering skyscrapers or to the same airport, all of us about to enter a city.

  I now have a clear view of our assigned runway at Narita ahead. I remember, for an instant, the summer I came to Japan in school or the times I later flew here on business trips. I wonder who is among the passengers today, what songs they are listening to as they gaze out. “I am visual,” I say. I disconnect the autopilot and silence the whooping siren that warns me I’ve done so. We lower the landing gear just before we cross the coastline. We complete the extension of the flaps and read the landing checklist. The air is bumpier now, yet another physical sensation that, like the spreading wing and the changing tune of the engines, marches hand in hand with the growing view of return.

  Jonathan Livingston Seagull found that when he flew low over the water he could fly “longer, with less effort.” Many pilots, whether or not that book inspired their choice of profession, will recognize just what he meant. When an airplane is in the final stages of the approach, a certain amount of power from the engines, paired with a certain angle of the nose, guides it down to the runway. But these settings must be slightly changed toward the end of the flight. The wing starts to produce more lift when it is near the ground, even if nothing else has changed. On the 747, I feel what is described as a float through the controls, a sudden resistance by the airplane to descend as willingly as before.

  As the plane
approaches the ground, the air beneath it can no longer move out of its way in time. So the air begins to act like a pillow. The proximity of the ground also prevents the vortices that spin off the wingtips from forming properly, which further enhances the efficiency of the wing. When an aircraft experiences this we say it is entering its own ground effect. The next time you see a 747 sailing over a park or a highway only moments before landing, at about the elevation of a twenty-story building, consider that this is the height at which the great restless jet begins to settle itself on the air you are breathing beneath it, a parting gift of antigravity from the sky or a welcome from the earth the airplane is coming home to.

  At takeoff, particularly on a heavy airliner, there is an exquisitely balanced moment of hesitance when, at the stage called rotation, the plane’s nose is first raised. This sense of aerial equivocation is not entirely imaginary, not entirely a consequence of any lingering, atavistic disbelief in the possibility of ever taking to the sky. At rotation the nose lifts, which means the tail must fall, and passengers in the rear of the plane may correctly feel that they have lowered in the sky at the moment they expected the opposite to happen. They go down before they go up. Then at liftoff, which comes shortly after rotation, the aircraft’s weight at last leaves the wheels and rests fully into the upturned arc of the more sharply bending wings, which again may give the briefest sensation of settling back.

  These effects, which give way to soaring almost before we can recognize them, add up to flight’s most liminal moment, as if the articles of faith, or the numbers behind the physics of the enterprise, must be quickly incanted or calculated again each time we take flight.

  Takeoff’s brief pause, that hanging in the in-between, finds its twin at the end of each flight. In the last few hundred vertical feet of our journey from London, as I start to feel the ground effect, I lower the nose slightly, remove a touch of power. The captain calls out the new thrust I’ve intuitively set so that I need not look at the gauges. At about 30 feet above Japan I pull the nose up and begin to close the thrust levers. I feel again that moment of poise: the sense that continued flight is as likely as anything else, that a question has been asked but not answered. Then the hard-won lift runs like water from the wings, and we land.

  —

  Often I fly over a place that is tied to my own life in some way. Sometimes when I fly to Boston I don’t stay at the official crew hotel; instead I visit friends north of the city. The next evening the climbing airplane passes right over their town. If I see the river near my friends’ home, I will think about the table they laid for me and the grateful pilot who came to their place and felt no sort of lag, until it was time to fly away.

  Sometimes I fly over a place I have known in another context or time, and the sight gives a new life to the memory, a depth I might not find even if I traveled there again. When I was a child my family spent a few summers on Lake Winnipesaukee, in New Hampshire, in a cabin where even in July the mornings were cold enough to require a fire. Occasionally I see the corner we knew of that lake from the sky. To come across it again now that I am three or four times the age I was when I last swam there, in seasons other than the summers I knew it in—to see it frozen and snow-covered, or lined with autumn colors, looking from high up as if the turning trees were mere red lichen around a pool lying in the indent of a rock in a forest—has been a happy experience. In summer, when I see the boats on the lake below, their wakes like the trails of comets on the sky-blue water, and think about the young families in them, it’s not quite that I feel that I am looking back in time. But certainly from above, and from so many years later, the lake takes on a wholeness that is indistinguishable from my memory of it.

  Often I hear colleagues say, in a jet over Britain, that they are within a few miles of their own house—or right over it. They say this without looking out the window; sometimes they say it when we are in cloud. They know the bearings and the beacons, the miles to home.

  On flights from London to Mexico City I now and then pass over the part of the world that I know best, western Massachusetts, where I grew up. We always spent all the holidays with a group of three other families who were friends of my parents; they are like aunts and uncles, and their children are like my cousins, all the more so now that my parents are gone. Western Massachusetts from above looks like the place they came to and the place I came from. There is not much to distinguish it from the surrounding forested lands. I’m comforted, somehow, that most everyone else onboard would see only trees.

  Even the mountain here, Mount Greylock, at only 3,491 feet is hard to pick out, though it is the tallest in Massachusetts. The war memorial on top of it, a tall stone tower beneath which we had many picnics when I was a child, is the best clue. When I find the mountain I think of Herman Melville, looking up at it from his desk in Pittsfield, between thoughts of less landlocked places. Often I overfly western Massachusetts not long after crossing the ocean from Europe. If there is a solid deck of fresh snow or cloud over the land, I remember that it was winter’s obliteration of this countryside that gave Melville “a sort of sea-feeling here in the country,” that he would look from his house on the land as from “a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic” and wonder, as the winter wind howled around, if there was “too much sail on the house.”

  —

  Before I became a pilot, if you had asked me to talk about a city that I had visited, I might have thought first of its architecture, its food, or a memorable event from my first visit there. Now I tend to think first of its geographic situation: what it looks like from above and far away; whether it is on the edge of mountains or the sea or a desert; what ideas of land give way, like distance itself, to the fact of Vancouver or Milan. These are places that feel different to me even when I walk through them, because I know what it looks like to arrive in them from the sky. This is one of the satisfactions of my job that surprised me: not flight itself but this almost anachronistically literal awareness of how cities rest on the physical world.

  There is another category of city, though, for which the aerial, geographic sense of a place does not augment other impressions of it, because I have no other impressions. Doha, Athens, Kiev, Ankara, Tripoli, Buenos Aires, Zagreb; I have landed in these cities and then flown away, without ever leaving the airport. Sometimes I have not even left my seat.

  In this category of cities it’s Moscow that I’ve flown to most often. I could tell you how unusually round Moscow looks, the metropolitan phenotype that is the privilege of cities born in flat and landlocked places. I might mention Moscow’s multiple, concentric ring roads—one of which roughly corresponds to the city’s medieval boundaries and gates—that glow in the pitch-black winter nights like the rings of an electric cooktop. When I flew the Airbus and went often to Moscow we were not permitted to fly over the city center, nor were we usually permitted to fly around it in a counterclockwise direction, and so we would fly nearly three-quarters of a circle around the city, as if it were an aerial traffic circle. On such arrivals it felt that we were orbiting, caught in the gravity of the city, and that the aircraft’s wide, long turns echoed the purpose and the shape of the ring roads below.

  I could tell you more than I ever expected to know about Moscow’s weather, and something about the Muscovites I met who worked at the airport or whom I met on my flights. From above at night, I have seen the whole of the city more clearly than many people who live there ever will, set on the land like some great fired wheel turning on the snow, encircled by the dark forests, under the navigation lights of the airplanes banking around it.

  Yet in nearly every other sense I am a stranger to Moscow, and perhaps the worst kind, who may decide he knows something of a place from only a series of brief exposures to the most abstracted and antiseptic of views. What lie within the ring roads, for me, are lights, not individuals. Whatever I might imagine of the lives in the city comes from television and novels and history books.

  Perhaps this is only an extreme versi
on of how we experience any place, even one where we get out and walk around, even the one we live in. We will never know more than an absurdly small portion of any city or landscape. But still, when I’m asked if I have been to Moscow, the question makes me a little uncomfortable. No matter how many people I’ve taken home to the city, no matter how many times I have followed its transformation from a distant glow to a circular galaxy of light and at last into the physical sensation of touchdown, I feel that no is the only possible answer to the question of whether I have been there.

  The skies of Alaska are relatively busy. There are many airplanes and aviation is important, for good reason—with its residents living in a few concentrated areas and many small settlements separated by vast distances, towering mountains, inhospitable terrain, and water in its least convenient forms, Alaska is a microcosm of the jet-age planet. John McPhee, in Coming into the Country, describes how Alaskans, if asked whether they’ve been to a place that they’ve seen from the air but where they haven’t stood upon the ground, may reply with a qualified sort of yes; they may say that they’ve “flown it.”

  The question of what it means to fly a place arises not only for cities but for whole lands. I have long been fascinated by Arabia—by its appearance on maps and globes or in old tales encountered in childhood, by the name I saw so long ago, etched on the side of a plane moving slowly over the ice-ridged taxiways at Kennedy Airport. When I fly now over Arabia and imagine and say its names to myself—Jeddah, Medina, Mecca, Dhahran, and Riyadh—and then see something of Saudi Arabia’s present day, its solar panels and crop circles, the cold, sprawling glitter of desert cities in the furnace of summer nights, the coasts and highways shining up like the most perfect map of the country in my mind, I feel that I can say I know something of the place.