Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot

by Mark Vanhoenacker

  During my final instrument exam, as we approached the minimum altitude for a runway near Bristol, the examiner reached up and began to move one of the screens. So I continued the descent for a second or two, as I could now just see the runway ahead and I thought he was in the process of removing the screens entirely. But he didn’t. He then turned to me and said: “You have committed the cardinal sin of instrument flying. You have continued an approach below the minimum altitude without the appropriate visual reference.” Crushed, I turned the plane back to our home airport.

  The next day I repeat that portion of the exam with more success. I am at last in the clear, I think, a phrase that gets an understandable amount of airtime among pilots undergoing instrument training. But the following day my instructor calls. He tells me that there’s a problem with my license. Though I’ve completed all my exams, I don’t have quite enough hours in my logbook yet. We have to go flying, he says, “we have to go up”—for at least three hours and thirteen minutes.

  “Where are we going?” I ask. “Wherever you like,” he replies with a smile. It’s an answer that aspiring commercial pilots, on a tight and expensive training schedule, do not hear all that often. So even before we took off it had the makings of a great day: a plane, a warm late-summer afternoon, blessedly clear skies all across southern England, no fixed itinerary. I was even allowed to invite a friend along.

  We lift into the blue and head south toward the coast, following the edge of the Channel toward Eastbourne, Hastings, Dover. “Have you been to Canterbury?” the instructor asks. I have not. We bank to the northwest, near enough to see the cathedral. The very first cumulus clouds begin to form in the afternoon heat. We turn north toward the estuary of the Thames, crossing its waters with the sea on our right, while on our left the river, that in later years will become by far the one I know best from the air, winds upstream and disappears into the haze of the capital. We head across Essex and Suffolk, toward Norfolk and the Fens that might be the Netherlands, just across the sea.

  Several American fighters from a nearby military base parallel us. It is like a Porsche racing a bicycle. Their extraordinary speed, as they rocket past us, shows us more than how slow we are; it gives the illusion that we are flying in reverse.

  As we turn back toward Oxford we see the puffy billows of water are now blossoming all over southeast England, called up by the afternoon sun, as densely and randomly as dandelions in a field. For perhaps the most joyful half hour I will ever spend in the sky, I bank the plane left and right, frolicking and dodging through gaps that so many unseen calculations of the air and sun and earth have left.

  I try to pin down what this sense of weaving reminds me of. The visual effect resembles a lower-stakes crossing of an asteroid field in a science-fiction movie. But such physical interactions with the clouds feel more like some aerial emancipation of downhill skiing, the quick alternation of dramatic lefts and rights, the sense of slipping forward even as I make sharp turns around a fleecier species of mogul. I turn back to my friend. She smiles and gives me two thumbs-up. The instructor, too, is apparently enjoying himself. After we land he remarks that such flights, with freshly minted pilots who are not under the shadow of formal instruction or exams, are a rare treat for him, too.

  Since that day I’ve often been startled by the perfect joyfulness of flying close to clouds. The smallest clouds may be no more than tens of yards across. That is larger than the small plane I was flying, but smaller than a 747. Perhaps, for brains designed to maneuver us quickly through tight and dangerous places, it provides a kind of mischievous transcendence to dive between such white-hard arrangements of ethereality, near-absences that bear the visual weight of mountains.

  It’s an even greater pleasure to sail right through them. To fly directly into the billowing illusions of towering substance as if they were nothing—or as if it were us that were without corporality—is, to a new pilot, an entirely separate order of aerial pleasure. We close on structures that may be smaller than the plane, or the size of cities, clouds like sky lakes, their edges rotated into three dimensions of white shore; then we are amid the total, white nothing. That is, almost nothing. There is often just enough of a jolt when we enter a cloud, a quick rumble as we dive into the difference of sky, to remind us of the difference in sky-circumstance that explains why a cloud is there at all. Then we fly out the other side, and it all returns in the cleanest instant. There it is; the world, again.

  Fluffy cumulus are the clouds I love best; they are flying high, on cloud nine, in seventh heaven; they are walking on air. They are the clouds that fill rococo artworks or that are painted upon faux skylights in the ceilings of the New York Public Library and Versailles. Even these, the most exuberant of clouds, seem to possess a slow, dignified consciousness, a feeling that’s enhanced by our ability, from the windows of airplanes, to directly observe not only their movements but also their barely perceptible growth. If you have ever been on a whale watch, moving among clouds has something of the same quality—the sense that these enormous, lounging creatures are directed by steadier lights; that they can hardly notice something as small and jittery as us, and inhabit frames of time that we have lost.

  Of course, 747s do not linger in playful summer cumulus that provides such delight to new pilots. Except for brief periods around takeoff and landing we mostly see these happy clouds from above, where the pleasure they give, like a memorable tale or joke, often takes the form of an unexpected reversal. Seen from cruising altitude, cumulus clouds—the connected parentheses or arcs cut from circles as children draw them—lie surprisingly close on the world. Like fireworks as we understand them from an airplane, they are basically ground events.

  As we look down upon such clouds, upon what more typically looks down upon us, we realize that today it’s the planet, not the sky, that is partly cloudy. This, I think, may be what I’ll miss most after I retire—this customary, daily view of the gathered thoughts of our home skies; the low world beneath its eaves of water.

  Often clouds form over land in the rising heat of the day, but fail to do so over nearby open water. On one memorable afternoon during my first summer on the 747, I flew west from London to New York. All of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, and the southern Welsh coast were dotted with clouds, while the sea off these places itself remained as blue-clear as the sky above. In this way the clouds were a self-portrait of the land drawn by its own rising warmth, a mirroring cartography of mist, and also a kind of inverted sky-hourglass that measured out the lateness of the afternoon. Such cloudscapes often form over an island-dotted sea, where they form an aerial archipelago all their own, a map we can read long before we overfly the land it encodes.

  Other days, though far from land, occasional cumulus clouds scatter above the open sea, each casting a small pool of darkness onto the oceanic blue. Here there’s no earth to make sense of the patterns, no codex to the chaos of air instabilities that would answer the same question—why here?—raised by a lone tree standing in a meadow.

  Contrails are a contraction of condensation trails; they can cover 5 percent of the busiest skies and may be described as man-made clouds. We see, too, their opposite. Sometimes a plane below us passes through the top edge of a cloud and the swirling heat of its engines will cut a trench right through it, and so the airplane leaves not a white trail in clear sky but a clear trail in a white one; a rare sight we might call an anti-contrail.

  Sometimes an uneven wind, which we can feel in the cockpit is choppy, scatters the white contrails left by the airplane ahead of us, disassembling their rectitude and writing the turbulence on the blue in a freely tumbling white cursive. At other times a steady high breeze takes the contrail, immediately lifting this record of a jet’s passage whole in one direction across the sky, away from the route we share; the drifting contrail is then a time stamp of the aircraft that made it. From the ground you can observe the formation of such wind-borne diasporas of contrails, when a plane passes and its after-cloud floats su
rprisingly quickly across anything high and steady in your line of sight—electrical wires, say, or the branches of a tree.

  When there is no wind, the contrails stay in their appointed positions for some time, and so on a busy air route we occasionally see a stack of contrails, as neatly arranged as the lines of a pole fence. On a moonlit night, if there is only one above and one below, running off to the horizon to where each ghostly fog-line is headed by the glow of a distant plane, then it’s as if the lights and the path of one craft are only the reflection of the other’s.

  —

  I’m often disappointed when I arrive over a region of grand scenery—the American Southwest, Greenland, Iran—or any place I have not seen before, and find the world cloaked, or when the world below is cloudy for an entire flight. Such days, however, are a reminder that overcast days are not sealed off but divided. Regular flyers and even pilots may forget that to cross this division effortlessly, to sail into the upper hemisphere of our hours, is a new realm of experience. From the grayest of mornings, from the dullest of meetings and the longest of lines at the post office, we climb into the light-filled clerestory of the world.

  If the plane is heavy and climbing slowly, or the cloud deck is ill defined, then the jet rises from the white as if lifted by some slow, innate buoyancy. The transition to the upper regions of the day is gradual. If, on the other hand, the plane is climbing quickly, and the tops are sharply defined, then the plane launches itself into the sky like a kickboard that a swimmer has forced underwater; when it is let go and breaks the surface. Clouds are associated with disturbances and risings in the air; and so rising out of the clouds often means soaring out of turbulence, too, into a sky that is both clear and smooth; a sky that is clear because it is smooth.

  There’s a direct analogy between the career of a pilot and every flight that takes place on an overcast day. When you first learn to fly, you avoid the clouds. Later, you learn to use instruments to fly through them, and later still you may fly airliners that soar above them almost always. I remember clearly, then, the start of my instrument flight training. It was the first day I was permitted to fly through clouds, instead of air-skiing around them or remaining on the ground. It was also the first day I shared a radio frequency with actual airliners arriving in the skies of southeast England from all around the world; the first time I called “London Control.”

  It’s surprising how many layers of cloud can lie over each other and the world, each with its own hues and personality of light; we climb from one to another of them as if rising through the storys, each so marvelously different, of a building cast of mist. Higher layers may be thin, even transparent, and we can often look through one layer of cloud at another beneath it. A high, thin layer of racing cloud has the organic and mathematical look of sand drifting across a hard-packed beach, or snow caught in the headlights of a car, blowing low over the dark road surface. At different heights such sheets appear to move at different speeds—world-scaled panels of water, sliding across each other, each as big as the sky.

  The lowest of these surfaces may be the ocean itself, cut perhaps with the sharp angles of icebergs floating beneath a stack of mist-rounded insubstantialities. Like so many wonders from the window seat, such a sight feels both abstracted and true; there’s no difference between how we might imagine such a scene and what we actually see.

  Imagine the loveliest red sunset, and place it above the grayest of days, where we forget it so often is. Sometimes at dusk, climbing up through such layers of cloud, the plane emerges from the monochromatic low world into a dizzyingly smooth vault of nearly horizontal red light. As we rise in the sky it’s as if the global circuit breaker for color had been tripped but has now been reset, as if this red is its own kind of cloud, yet another state of water, that we discovered in the heavens. The crimson cloud surfaces can then take on the look of some interstitial volume of the body, the inner tissues of a world without scale.

  Georgia O’Keeffe was afraid of flying but obsessed with the clouds she saw from airplanes, which she painted with an all but religious devotion: “When you fly under even normal circumstances, you see such marvelous things, such incredible colors that you actually begin to believe in your dreams.” I try to remember, when I haven’t flown for some time, and the handles of the bags of groceries that I’m carrying through a cold and rainy November dusk are about to break, that such a lake of light may be above the clouds that rest upon the street.

  —

  In the normal visual pace of descent and arrival, possibilities of place narrow as specificities multiply. What we might call the arrival effect happens in two senses: the vertical and the horizontal. Arriving over land, the world resolves itself vertically, because more of its detail is visible as we descend closer to it. At the same time, the space between cities is transforming horizontally. Wilderness distills to farms, farms into suburbs that are riven by main roads that lead to the city itself. These twinned accelerations, these parallel condensations of detail, are what it means to come to a city from the air.

  Place lag occurs because our sense of where we are cannot travel as fast as the plane. The sight of an approaching city on a crystal-clear day can briefly mask place lag, because what is gradually happening in the window has its own visual flow, a progression of geographic logic that may give the illusion of sensibility or comprehension. But when place appears suddenly, only when the clouds at last part, then for once what happens to place before our eyes is aligned with what happens to it in our mind. The eye closed, and now it opens.

  On that flight to an overcast Amsterdam, the first flight I took alone, I was disappointed to see so little from the window seat during the arrival. But the Holland that emerged so late in the window—the sea, the ships, the wind-lashed walkers on the beach, the wet lanes of the morning rush-hour traffic bending toward Amsterdam, the green fields, and the roof panels of the many greenhouses—held my imagination for a long time after the flight; much longer, perhaps, than it would have if the skies had been clear. I came to love this gift from the clouds: the experience of seeing so little for so long, until we see everything.

  Some tropical cities, like Singapore, have been surrounded by great vertical extents of rising afternoon cloud every time I have flown to them. We descend into this world, we fly down and around these columns of vapor long before we ever see the city’s skyscrapers or runways, as if we must pass first through the gates and along the avenues of the cloud-city of Singapore before we reach the concrete metropolis that is carrying on beneath it.

  In London, the proximity and typical weather of Heathrow mean that after hours of white and gray, often the first sight of the returning earth is the heart of the city that called us across the world, its wharves and new skyscrapers rising like great masts from the ordinary busy morning that waited beneath the clouds.

  We take such navigation for granted, as if it’s nothing to us, to fly across the planet and then to approach the white-granite surface of the cloud world with the now ordinary intention of simply descending through it, to find all of London lying like pages of densely typeset newsprint spread upon a floor. The sky waters extinguished geography, perhaps for nearly the entire journey. Now they part and place arrives, not as the long-building and inevitable visual conclusion to a journey, but as if with the blinding, voltaic thump of light arrays high around a stadium: here is London, in the toll of its present hour.

  —

  Low-lying fog, seen from the ground beneath it, all but extinguishes the world. From above, however, fog can resemble little more than a veil of gauze drawn across the land, so low upon it, seemingly, that for someone on the ground to rise above it would be as simple as standing up.

  Visibility measured along the runway is called runway visual range. You can see the transmissometers that measure this near runways; they look like two periscopes that have emerged from the earth, swiveled, and spotted each other and are now staring each other down. A landscape’s predilections for fog are an
important consideration when choosing where to build an airport, and so transmissometers may be erected long before the airport itself. A captain once told me a rumor about the residents near such a potential new airport, who put garbage bags over the transmissometers, to conjure the illusion of dense fog at what, to distant engineers, must have suddenly seemed like the worst place in the world to site an airport.

  Often when fog is causing delays that ripple throughout a day and across a continent, the sky above it is nevertheless perfectly clear. We prepare for a landing in fog while we are descending in clear and open sunlight. Only in the last seconds does the plane descend into the rolling waves of mist; the world and runway vanish as wholly as if someone has cast a gray sheet over the nose of the aircraft.

  Sometimes the fog lies on a runway only in patches, and so we must evaluate multiple visibility reports from several different points along the runway before we decide to make an approach. Once I flew to Edinburgh and we landed in perfect sunshine. Then, a third of the way down the runway, we rolled into a total whiteout before, a thousand feet further, sailing back into bewildering billows of sunlight, an experience I otherwise associate with biking or driving across the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Not long ago I approached London on a foggy autumn morning. A brighter lighting system had recently been installed on the southern runway we would shortly land on. The controllers directed us right over Heathrow, then east toward central London, before turning us back for our final approach. As I flew above the airport and banked overhead, I could see that the fog ran only in portions over this runway, in slow, wind-rolled breakers. It could have been a road through time, from a prehistoric moor to some future space age: one half of the runway was submerged in fog that blurred but did not entirely mask the lights beneath, while the other half was completely clear, its mathematical, illuminated patterns forming a dazzling welcome to the homeward-bound sky vessels.