On every takeoff there is a speed known as V1. Before this speed we have enough room left ahead of us on the runway to stop the takeoff. After this speed we may not. Thus committed to flight, we continued for some time along the ground, gathering still more speed to the vessel. A few long seconds after V1 the jet reached its next milestone of velocity and the captain called: “Rotate.” As the lights of the runway started to alternate red and white to indicate its approaching end, as the four rivers of power that summed to nearly a quarter of a million pounds of thrust unfurled over the runway behind us, I lifted the nose.
As if we had only pulled out of a driveway, I turned right, toward Tokyo.
London, then, was on my side of the cockpit. The city grew bigger before it became smaller. From above, still climbing, you realize that this is how a city becomes its own map, how a place becomes whole before your eyes, how from an airplane the idea of a city and the image of a city itself can overlay each other so perfectly that it’s no longer possible to distinguish between them. We followed London’s river, that led the vessels of a former age from their docks to the world, as far as the North Sea. Then the sea turned, and Denmark, Sweden, Finland passed beneath us, and night fell—the night that both began and ended over Russia. Now I’m in the new day’s blue northwest of Japan, waiting for Tokyo to rise as simply as the morning.
I settle myself into my sheepskin-covered seat and my particular position above the planet. I blink in the sun, check the distance of my hands and feet from the controls, put on a headset, adjust the microphone. I say good morning to my colleagues, in the half-ironic sense that long-haul pilots will know well, that means, on a light-scrambling journey, I need a minute to be sure where it is morning, and for whom—whether for me, or the passengers, or the place below us on the earth, or perhaps at our destination. I ask for a cup of tea. My colleagues update me on the hours I was absent; I check the computers, the fuel gauges. Small, steady green digits show our expected landing time in Tokyo, about an hour from now. This is expressed in Greenwich Mean Time. In Greenwich it is still yesterday. Another display shows the remaining nautical miles of flight, a number that drops about one mile every seven seconds. It is counting down to the largest city that has ever existed.
I am occasionally asked if I don’t find it boring, to be in the cockpit for so many hours. The truth is I have never been bored. I’ve sometimes been tired, and often I’ve wished I were heading home, rather than moving away from home just about as quickly as it is possible to do so. But I’ve never had the sense that there was any more enjoyable way to spend my working life, that below me existed some other kind of time for which I would trade my hours in the sky.
Most pilots love their work and have wanted to do it for as long as they can remember. Many began their training as soon as they could, often in the military. But when I started my training course in Britain, I was surprised at how many of my fellow trainees had traveled quite far down another path—they were medical students, pharmacists and engineers, who, like me, had decided to return to their first love. For me, coming later to the profession has been an opportunity to think about why many of my colleagues and I were drawn back so strongly to a half-forgotten notion, one that we shared as children.
Some pilots enjoy the hand-to-eye mechanics that are related to movement in three dimensions, particularly the challenges that cluster at the beginning and end of every flight. Others have a natural affinity for machines, and airplanes are engineered nobility, lying well beyond most cars, boats, and motorcycles on the continuum of our shiny creations.
Many pilots, I think, are especially drawn to the freedom of flight. A jet is detached, physically remote and separate for a certain number of miles and hours. Such solitude is all but absent from the world now, and so—paradoxically, for in the cockpit we could hardly be better encased in technology—flight feels increasingly old-fashioned. Paired with this freedom is the opportunity to come to know the cities of the world well and to see so much of the land, water, and air that lie between them.
Then, too, there is the perennial yearning for height that many of us share. High places have gravity. They pull us up. Elevation remains simple, a prime number, an element on the periodic table. “Higher, Orville, higher!” cried the father of the Wright brothers, when he made his first flight at the age of eighty-one. We build skyscrapers and visit their observation decks; we ask for an upper floor in a hotel; we ponder photographs taken from high above our homes, our towns, our planet with a mix of love and bewildered recognition; we climb mountains and try if we can to save our sandwich for the summit. On my first morning in a new city I’ll often go first to a viewing point on top of a tall building, where I occasionally see travelers whom I recognize from my flight.
Perhaps evolution alone explains the attraction of altitude. Here is the big picture, the survey, the overview, the lookout, the lay of our land, what approaches our cave or castle. Strabo, the Greek geographer who would partly inspire Columbus, climbed the acropolis of Corinth merely to gain perspective on the city. When my father arrived to work as a missionary in a poor neighborhood of the Brazilian metropolis of Salvador, his first step was to hire a pilot to help him photograph the unmapped neighborhood and its informal, largely unnamed streets. Many years later, after he died, my brother and I heard a rumor that a street in this locality had been named for him after he left Brazil. We pored over a map of the city on a laptop to find Rua Padre José Henrique, Father Joseph Henry Street; we zoomed in from the digital sky, from four decades and many thousands of miles away, to remember the story of his first flight over this city.
But I think our love of height cannot be entirely explained by its many practical uses. In so many realms we seek evidence of interconnection, of parts that form a whole. In music, comedy, science, we respond to the revealing of relationships we did not see at first, or did not expect to find so pleasing. Flight is the cartographic, planetary equivalent of hearing a song covered by a singer you love, or meeting for the first time a relative whose features or mannerisms are already familiar. We know the song but not like this; we have never met this person and yet we have never in our lives been strangers. Airplanes raise us above the patterns of streets, forests, suburbs, schools, and rivers. The ordinary things we thought we knew become new or more beautiful, and the visible relationships between them on the land, particularly at night, hint at the circuitry of more or less everything.
I’ve occasionally toured cathedrals in faraway cities that have labyrinths, sinuous paths inlaid in the stone that you follow around and around, back and forth. I’ve been struck by the peacefulness of labyrinths, the intended result of being able to see your path, and the contrast such a gift makes with the barely relaxing experience of walking a maze, or even the aisles of a supermarket, where you cannot see the whole.
Even today many travelers leave home not just to see new places, but also to see the whole of the place they have left from the various kinds of distance—cultural, physical, linguistic—that travel opens for them. Indeed, a fascination with this perspective is something I associate with the most experienced travelers. Occasionally I fly to a city in which one of the attendants on my flight lives, or was born, and he or she is invariably eager to join us in the cockpit for takeoff or landing, in order to watch how the loved place, though it has no remaining mysteries, leaves the cockpit windows or comes to fill them again.
I love flying, for all these reasons. But to me the joy of airliners is the particular quality of their motion over the world. When I run through the woods, over the ground, the branches are close, loud, fast. I am what’s moving. Up and down, turning along the path, my feet never land twice at the same angle. I could stop to touch anything. In contrast, films taken of the earth from orbit show a wholly different kind of motion, a steady and weighty perfection of turning, an imperious stability that’s the last thing we might expect from such unfathomable height and speed.
An airliner does not move at either of these e
xtremes. In the course of each flight, however, it crosses much of the continuum between them. I love to fly because I love to watch the world go by. After takeoff we see the world just as we would from a small plane. Then in the high middle hours of a flight we perceive less detail, of course, but we also see a greater extent of the earth than we were surely ever meant to encounter at one time. And in some achingly stately inversion of our senses it’s in the cruise, when we are highest and fastest, that place turns most deliberately. The connections below make the most sense to me from this abstracted, apparently slow motion above them. The connections are made as a matter of course, we might say, as a road or a river or a railway runs between two cities, and one landscape or cloudscape flows into another as easily as lines across a page. They also build over time, as the dimensions of a city, a country, or an ocean are summed by the minutes or hours such a place takes to cross the mind’s eye.
Then we descend; we make our approach to another place. The world accelerates as we return; it looks fastest just before landing, when the airplane is slowest. The wheels race at takeoff but are stilled in flight, and on touchdown they are sped up again by the earth. This touch turns the speed of flight to the speed of the wheels; the brakes turn this to the heat of home, of a journey’s end, that is carried off on the wind.
A measure of longing is attached to any mode of travel, of course. By definition every traveler wishes, or needs, to be somewhere else. What is longed for may be the place you have just left. Or it may be a forest or cathedral or desert you have read about or imagined since childhood, or a place you have always wished to live, or a place you knew well when you were young. But flight, which takes us so far to or from what we love, embodies this longing most directly. The space through which the airplane moves is so alien. Humans can’t breathe in it. We can’t pull over halfway and silence the machine and stretch our legs; we can’t swim in it or hold on to the side of the pool. The adversity of the sky sharply divides the journey from the times and places that lie at either end.
When travelers move between points on the globe so different in culture, language, and history—London, Tokyo—the imaginative distance can be as vast as the physical gap in the air above them. Like the music you love best, this mental distance feels partly external and partly your own. And so high above the world, open to more of the planet and sky than any species has the right to see, we find room for introspection in one of the last places we might have thought to look for it. When I was thirteen and got my first portable cassette player and headphones and began to choose music for myself, I asked my brother if pilots were allowed to listen to music while they flew. He answered that he wasn’t sure, but he thought not. He was right. But as passengers we are all given these increasingly rare quiet hours in which there is nowhere we have to go and nothing we have to do, hours in which we are alone with our thoughts and music and the moving picture of our journeys.
Then we blink and suddenly we see again the earth we are flying over. From the window seat our focal point crosses between the personal and the planetary so smoothly that such movement seems to hint at a new species of grace, that we would come to only in the sky. Whatever our idea of the sacred, our simplest questions—how the one relates to the many, how time equates to distance, how the present rests on the past as simply as our lights lie on each night’s darkened sphere—are rarely framed as clearly as they are by the oval window of an airplane. We look through it, over snowcapped cordilleras in the last red turn of the day, or upon the shining night-palmistry of cities, and we see that the window is a mirror, briefly raised above the world.
The journey, of course, is not quite the destination. Not even for pilots. Still, we are lucky to live in an age in which many of us, on our busy way to wherever we are going, are given these hours in the high country, when lightness is lent to us, where the volume of our home is opened and a handful of our oldest words—journey, road, wing, water; earth and air, sky and night and city—are made new. From airplanes we occasionally look up and are briefly held by the stars or the firmament of blue. But mostly we look down, caught by the sudden gravity of what we’ve left, and by thoughts of reunion, drifting like clouds over the half-bright world.
Place
I’m thirteen. It’s late winter, still bitterly cold. My dad and I have driven from our home in Massachusetts south to New York City. At Kennedy Airport we park on top of the Pan Am terminal. We’re here to pick up a cousin of mine who is coming to live with us for a few months. We are early, or perhaps his flight is late. We stay for some time under the gray skies and watch the planes as they ascend from distant runways and roll to the gates beneath us.
Among the coming and going of airliners I see an aircraft from Saudi Arabia approach the terminal. I have loved airplanes since I was a small child, but I feel a new kind of astonishment at this particular plane, at the sword and the palm tree on the tail, and the name on the side of the jet.
For some reason—the day, my age, a sudden new understanding that the cousin who will eat dinner across from me at our table at home tonight is still somewhere in the sky—the sight of this plane mesmerizes me. A few hours ago the jet, and all that it contains, was probably stopping for fuel in Europe, and a few hours before that it was in Arabia. When I woke up in my bedroom this morning, when I sat at the table in our kitchen to have my cereal and orange juice, when we got into the car, this aircraft was already hours into a journey that was as routine to it in its realm as my walk to school is in mine. Now my father and I watch the last of its many turns over the earth that day; the plane is parking—what my parents do when they come back from the supermarket, and what a pilot does, too, I realize, even at the end of a journey from a place like Arabia to a city like New York.
The doors and holds of the jet are still sealed. It strikes me that some essence of the day the jet has left behind, the day of some euphonious city name I have read on the globe in my bedroom—Jeddah or Dhahran or Riyadh, surely—might be locked inside. I try to imagine Saudi Arabia, falling back on my limited sense of deserts composed largely of the Saharan sands in The Little Prince. The passengers on that plane would fly this far, see from the window the Atlantic pressing on the snowy coast of Canada or New England; and at the same time my dad and I were driving along an icy old parkway through rural New York State, a road that could never connect you to Arabia, except that it runs to an airport and a plane like this one.
The physical achievement of airplanes—that they take us up into the air, that they enable us to fly—is not half their wonder. Place turns before an airplane with perfect steadiness. It appears in the air as our new and gossamer geography of the sky, it passes unseen, behind clouds or within the modern fiction of the flight computers, it flips past so quickly that it is like a conversation overheard in passing, when you cannot gain purchase on any individual word, or even be certain of the language. Then suddenly a pair of wings, this most charmed of our creations, brings us to a new day, a new place, and to such perfect stillness upon it that we are able to step through the unsealed door and start to walk.
—
I am in the cockpit of a 747 over the wintry-white Rockies, which spread out below me to the horizon. The world is divided: blue above, snow below. I remark on how the shadows of the peaks fall on the land; the captain tells me that clockwise is only clockwise because that is the direction of time, of a shadow, on a sundial in the northern hemisphere. A controller speaks to us on the radio, to announce the presence of another aircraft near us, “now at your two o’clock,” so we know in which direction to scour the blue. Then she announces our position as it would appear to the other aircraft: at their “ten o’clock.” The jet that started at our two o’clock moves to three, then five o’clock, and then it is behind us and we lose sight of it. The hour-places turn like the teeth of gears.
Jet lag results from our rapid motion between time zones, across the lines that we have drawn on the earth that equate light with time, and time with geography. Yet o
ur sense of place is scrambled as easily as our body’s circadian rhythms. Because jet lag refers only to a confusion of time, to a difference measured by hours, I call this other feeling place lag: the imaginative drag that results from our jet-age displacements over every kind of distance; from the inability of our deep old sense of place to keep up with our airplanes.
Place lag doesn’t require the crossing of a time zone. It doesn’t even require an airplane. Sometimes I’ve been in a forest, for a hike or a picnic, and then later the same day I have returned to a city. Surrounded by cars and noise and blocks of concrete and glass, I’ll find myself asking, how is it that I was walking in the woods this morning? I know it was only this morning I was in that different place; but already it feels like a week ago.
We evolved to move slowly over the world, in sight of everything en route. It makes sense that passing time and changing surroundings share a rhythm, and that as a consequence further or more different places naturally seem longer ago. The differences between a forest and a city are so enormous that the journey between them interposes itself as a chronological jump, a kind of time-hill.
This is true of all travel; and the greater the contrast the journey draws between home and away, the sooner the trip will feel as if it took place in the distant past. This equation is pushed to its imaginative limit by the airplane, which takes us on journeys almost none of us would ever undertake by other means, to places as different from our home as any on the planet, over many other places we will know only obliquely, if at all.
Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot Page 2