Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot

by Mark Vanhoenacker

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  I’ve just landed in Tripoli. We’re not staying overnight here; such a trip, in an overlapping of the terminology of airline crews and Tolkien, is known as a there-and-back. We’ve parked the plane, the passengers have disembarked, the cleaners have boarded. We arrived early—helped by a tailwind—and so we have some free time before we must begin the preparations for our return.

  I wander into the terminal. It’s true that airports are increasingly homogeneous, globalized places, but anyone who thinks that this process is complete might compare Tripoli’s airport to, say, Pittsburgh’s. I walk past the Libyan families and the Western oil workers, looking forward, perhaps, to their first beer in months after takeoff. I head to the roughly decorated cafeteria, to buy a snack I’ve come to like here: a tasty creation something like a spinach turnover. I browse in the small shop that stocks shelves of books written by Muammar Gaddafi and a handful of postcards of glamorous old Tripoli, the palm trees on the avenues faded and the address side discolored and a little damp.

  Eventually I return to the aircraft and walk to the back of the plane, to where rough metal stairs—air stairs, naturally—are positioned by an open door. I sit on them in the shadow of the tail, watching the occasional jet land, from airlines and cities whose names are unfamiliar to me. It’s hot, and since passengers can’t see me from the terminal, I take off my tie. I eat my Libyan turnover and then a sandwich I made in London this morning.

  Airport tarmacs have their own smells, of course, but here is also a telltale hazy breeze, one that mixes the heat and the nearby ocean with the golden dust that accumulates on everything and that I will have to brush from my trousers when I stand up. Soon enough it’s time to leave Libya, to fly back up into the common air, to cross the Mediterranean, and Corsica and the Alps and Paris, and then to descend to England’s sky.

  We bank over Tower Bridge. Not very long afterward I walk under the sky where I have flown, under the lights, timed like clockwork, of the next hour’s planes, to meet friends at a restaurant on the South Bank. They ask me how my day has been. Good, I say. It was good. Anywhere interesting? they ask, though they mean it half as a joke; nowhere I might answer would surprise them anymore. During the meal my attention drifts occasionally. How could it be, I ask myself, that I have gone to Africa today and returned? I blink and look around at my friends and the crowded restaurant, at the twinkling glasses and the dark woodwork. And I remember, as if from a dream, the blue sea of air over the Mediterranean, the blaze of an ordinary afternoon in Tripoli, and my lunch on the air stairs, in the shadow the plane brought to Libya and then took away.

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  Geography is a means of dividing the world—of drawing the lines of political entities or per-capita income or precipitation that best illuminate the surface of our spherical home and the often jarringly physical characteristics of our civilization on it. Aviation both writes its own geographies and reflects older ones, as does every air worker and traveler.

  There are places I have flown to, and places I have not. This is a way of thinking about the planet that I had not anticipated before I became a pilot; it is one that arguably matters more, not less, the more you travel. On a long-haul pilot’s own map of the world some cities glow with frequent and recent experience, others less so, and some are entirely dark. As a relatively junior pilot, I have a map sparser than those of most of my colleagues. It still happens once or twice a year that I fly to an airport I have never flown to before, because the route is new, or the airport itself is new, or the route has switched to the 747 from another aircraft. For days in advance of such a flight I will look at the charts for the airport and for others nearby, or at the flight documents prepared for a previous day’s flight. It is common, when we meet our colleagues for a flight, for the captain to ask: Have you been there recently? Or: Have you been there before? We are sharing our maps.

  Aside from my personal borders between the places I have and have not been to, the most fundamental division of the world may not be an obvious one, such as whether you are over land or water, in cloud or in the clear, whether it is dark or light. Perhaps the simplest bifurcation of the heavens is between the regions of the world that are covered by radar and those that are not. On the ground at certain airports, markings on our charts exactingly delineate those aprons or taxiways that cannot be directly seen by the controllers in the tower. The whole world is divided in a similar way, by the presence or absence of radar coverage. A surprisingly large portion of the world has no civilian radar. There is none over the seas once you leave coastlines far behind. There is none over Greenland, large parts of Africa, or significant portions of Canada and Australia. Where I fly within a certain distance of a radar site or installation—radar head is the term sometimes used for the rotating part—the air-traffic controllers can “watch” my plane in a direct sense. Where there is no radar, they cannot, and we must report our positions via various increasingly sophisticated electronic means or by reading out to them on the radio our time and altitude for various locations, a position report that they must then read carefully back, to check that they have heard us correctly.

  This sense of being watched, or not, divides the world. To be outside radar range is not like being in a place without cell phone coverage, because we are still in communication with the controllers. It’s not like entering a tunnel in a car and losing your GPS location, because pilots know where they are. Nor is the difference comparable to situations in which you are made uncomfortable by being observed, because pilots prefer controllers to be watching them; there is relief when controllers tell us we are radar identified, and the sense that we are crossing into a less isolated portion of the journey, or nearing its end.

  Mountains above a certain height constitute another division of the world, a separate realm of sky. The altitude above which we are required to wear oxygen masks if the cabin pressure fails is 10,000 feet, and so this rough contour shaped by peaks and an added safety margin forms perhaps the map of the world that a pilot might draw most easily from memory, as if sea level had risen by about 2 miles. The world that remains exists largely in two great, distinct bands. An enormously long swathe of Eurasia, from Spain across to the Alps and the Balkans, from Turkey roughly eastward to China and Japan, crossing the highlands of such countries as Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Mongolia, forms the heart of the map. Another long line of minimum altitudes marked on our charts in red runs in an all but unbroken line along the western side of the Americas, from Alaska down through the Andes; from the Arctic to the Southern Ocean.

  On this map of world-height, the United States east of the Mississippi does not exist. Huge portions of Africa, Brazil, Russia, and Canada are absent, too, as is the entire continent of Australia. A similar but inverted sort of blankness covers the peaks of the Himalayas. In 1933, only three decades after the first flight at Kitty Hawk, the peak of Everest was overflown by an airplane, though one of the onboard photographers passed out from a lack of oxygen. Today there are few routes over much of the Himalayas—not because airliners cannot easily overfly even Everest, but because the terrain beneath limits their ability to descend in the event of technical problems. For this reason many pilots consider the planet’s highest mountains least often of all.

  The air of the world is divided in other ways. We cannot fly just anywhere. Large regions of airspace are restricted, often for military use, while many smaller chunks are blocked off because they lie over noise-sensitive areas—the center of a city or the palace of a sultan. These restricted airspace blocks are usually marked on our charts by combinations of letters and numbers, not names. But near Mumbai is one known as the Tower of Silence. In the city is a structure on which members of the Parsi community can ritually leave the bodies of the deceased to be consumed by vultures, a process that is elsewhere called a sky burial. The area and its name are marked in red on our charts. Some areas where no jets will fly have a ceiling and stop at a certain height, but the Tower of Silence goes all the
way up.

  There are, of course, great socioeconomic divisions in the world that airliners cross almost as if they do not exist. Even poor countries generally have internationally standardized air-traffic rules and control services. We can envisage in the sky a kind of continuous space, an insulated sphere above and around the earth, in which these standards prevail, regardless of the conditions on the ground below. A plane flies through this well-regulated realm, over cities and countries where we would not wish to land if we had an ill passenger onboard, places that in terms of certain medical services might as well be the ocean; and then we descend from this upper world through similarly regulated corridors down to our destination itself, where a long list of standards—from the suitability of the available water to various safety-related aviation functions—have been assessed. An airliner bound for certain cities will leave London with water onboard for both the outbound and return journeys—sometimes carrying even round-trip fuel and food as well.

  In Cape Town, if the wind is from the north, you land from the south, flying, in the last minutes of the flight, near Khayelitsha, a Xhosa name that is almost as beautiful in English—New Home—and Mitchell’s Plain, townships that each house hundreds of thousands of people. When I have flown there as a passenger, and had the time to look, I have been struck visually by the power of birth and circumstance: the picture of inequity made by the shining wings from somewhere far away crossing over these settlements, and the freedom international travelers have to descend over the morning of half a million people, some of whom will have already flown, or will one day fly, but many of whom probably never will.

  It occurs to me, when I am flying over Hokkaido or rural Austria or Oklahoma City, to ask who might look up and see the contrails of the plane light up at dawn. I feel this equally when I am on the ground looking up at a plane, on the other side of this greeting, as if I’m still a kid marveling at what it must be like to be way up there or remembering my first flight. But there are many places where such reciprocity cannot yet be reflected, the places the plane moves freely over, where place is as heavy as lead.

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  The most curious aspect of the pilot’s life may not be that we work in the air. It is that our world on the ground—the realm of places we know well, and that we connect to other places, the world that for a child begins with the rooms at home, and then expands to the backyard, and to the neighborhood—is so enormous. The job induces an almost planetary sensibility, a mental geography that rounds countries and continents as easily as you follow turns in a path through a familiar wood.

  As a child you are taken to places by others. When I grew up and learned to drive I eventually drove myself to many of these same places: small towns, or lakes, or state forests in New England where my family had camped or hiked when I was young. I realized that although I remembered the sites well, they had floated freely in my memory, untethered to actual geography. I hadn’t known how they lay on a map or on the earth, how to travel to one, or between two of them, or how long such journeys might take. But when I drove to them myself, the cloud they formed began to sort itself, to fall into place, as we say, like the pieces of a wooden puzzle. I realized that a lake I thought faced in one direction actually faced another, for example, and was close to a second location that I had never linked it to.

  When I learned to fly, such a sorting of idea-places onto the physical world around me happened on a fully planetary scale. What suddenly appeared in the window included not only the few cities I had flown to as a child, but everything I saw from the air that was identifiable—all the cities and mountains and oceans I had heard of or read about and dreamed of someday visiting.

  This sense of a formal knowledge of places falling onto actual earth and lining and connecting up, one with another, may be similar to the ways in which bodies change in the minds of medical students when they first learn how the organs and bones they’ve always known the names of are really located in three dimensions, and how they’re connected by other tissues they did not know about before medical school. The first time I flew to Athens, I noted some digits on our paperwork that marked the presence of an area of high terrain not far off our route. As we approached this region a snowy peak came into view. I said to the captain: That’s quite a mountain. He looked at me as if I had said something strange and then answered: Mark, that’s Mount Olympus.

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  I’m over Arabia, routing toward Europe. Ahead is Aqaba, the lights of the Sinai; then the city of Suez, and the lights of ships streaming through the canal like blood cells in an animation of the earth’s circulatory system; then the glow of the Nile, a flowing ring of light around the waters, a flume that fans into Cairo, leading the eye to Alexandria, pooling on the coast; and off to the right is all of Israel, shimmering on its water so marvelously that if I did not know which coastal place I was gazing upon I would bet it was Los Angeles; and beyond is Lebanon, where I look for this night’s electrified shadow of the biblical city of Tyre, that “dwells at the entrance to the sea.” The next lights are those of ships, and then comes the illuminated net of Crete, and the city of Heraklion. An idea of these places was all I had, until I saw them turning below me in their natural order.

  A few hours later I am over Germany, looking down at an inland sea of light. I remember a childhood fascination with an atlas of the world owned by my parents, in which the most densely populated areas were clearly marked out, so that London or Los Angeles or Tokyo were surrounded by splotches of bright red. In northwest Germany, too, there was a large red area like this, that I was certain must be a misprint because it was so enormous and sprawled over a region that was far from any major German city I had heard of, such as Frankfurt or Munich. I asked my dad, and he told me the name of this place, which I still find beautiful, perhaps because I can remember him pronouncing what I myself can never properly say: the Ruhr. It is Germany’s most populous area, he told me, though you won’t yet know the names of even the largest cities that constitute it: Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg. The Ruhr is easy to see from the sky at night, a sprawling illumination as clear as any colorings in a childhood atlas.

  Before I became a pilot I had the naive sense—a feeling, as opposed to what I’d been taught to the contrary—that most people lived in a world that looked something like where I grew up: small towns, forests, fields, four seasons, hills in some recurring, familiar pattern, the reference of a coastline a few hours away, and the vague gravity of a major metropolis at some similar distance. Today I understand in a direct and visual sense what I learned in school, that humanity is concentrated in a dense set of the lower latitudes of the northern hemisphere, and further in a dense set of longitudes in the eastern hemisphere; and what I have read since school, that ours is an age of cities—small ones as well as the conurbations like Mumbai, Beijing, and São Paulo that dominate the urban earth—in which for the first time a majority of humanity lives.

  A plane’s center of gravity is a critical piece of information that pilots receive before takeoff; it depends on the weight and location on the aircraft of the passengers, cargo, and fuel. Methodologies vary, but several calculations place humanity’s center of gravity, the geographical midpoint of the world’s population, in or near the far north of India. I often fly not very far south of there, either approaching Delhi itself or passing it en route to southeast Asia. I imagine a bull’s-eye of concentric rings that begins at the center of gravity and echoes out, each ripple eventually sweeping up more and more of the planet’s population, and then I am reminded that I, like nearly everyone I know, am from the provinces, from the periphery of the map when the map is weighted by individual lives. When I fly between New York and London it is easy to forget that only in an economic sense are even these cities much more than outer stars in the galaxy of human geography, and that the place I myself have been centered—rural New England—is almost comically tangential, not even a footnote in the textbook a visitor from another planet might write about the geography of our
species. The question of how the world looks to most people is one I would have got entirely wrong before I became a pilot.

  A separate question is what the surface of the earth typically looks like. If someone had asked me this before I became a pilot, my answer would inevitably and provincially have focused on what I had seen of the earth in the places where I had lived or traveled—trees, rolling hills, small towns between big cities. Today I would answer that question differently. I would say that the world looks mostly uninhabited.

  Most of the earth’s surface is water, of course, and an enormous portion of what isn’t water is very sparsely populated—whether because it is too hot, too cold, too dry, or too high. We forget this, if we ever even learned it, because we never see it—unless, of course, we look out the window of airliners, at the vast, nearly empty regions that planes bear witness to, and carry us over, the in-between places that are such obvious features of our planet’s face but that by definition we are unlikely otherwise to experience. By one estimate, the portion of the earth’s surface on which an unclothed human could survive for twenty-four hours is about 15 percent. That’s a hard calculation to make—it depends on the season and weather, for example—but from the cockpit of a long-haul airliner, at least, such a figure does not surprise me.

  The shock of a nearly empty world is most startling on routes that take us into the far north, where so much of the planet’s emptiest land hides in plain sight. Over Canada and Russia, the world’s two largest countries, are many hours of flying where you see almost exclusively snow and ice, or their brief seasonal absence; this is the taiga, the forest, and the tundra where almost no one lives. The entire population of Canada is smaller than that of greater Tokyo, and nearly all Canadians live in a narrow strip along their country’s southern border. Siberia alone is larger than the entire United States, larger even than Canada; but Siberia has fewer inhabitants than Spain. Northeast Greenland has an area comparable to the combined size of Japan and France, and a population of forty. Many hot places, too, appear similarly desolate. We forget, unless we cross it as often as long-haul pilots do, that the Sahara isn’t much smaller than the United States; then there are the vast, barely inhabited portions of Australia, a continent comparable in breadth to the contiguous United States (as Australian postcards that overlay maps of the two make so clear); and then there is the Kalahari, and Arabia.