We land, taxi in, park, the doors of the jet and its cockpit are opened. He comes down the aisle toward me, carrying a bag on his shoulder. I recognize him immediately. He is from my hometown, my high school. I have not seen him in well over a decade. He did not even know I had become a pilot. “I vaguely remember something about you liking airplanes,” he laughs. He is in Berlin to visit a friend. We share phone numbers and smile at providence, that we’d run into each other so far down the road, and find that we had traveled the last hours of the journey together.
—
Occasionally an airline pilot flies an empty plane. Such flights without passengers are routine for cargo aircraft, of course, but that is their purpose. To fly a passenger plane that has no passengers feels unnatural. It occurs rarely, when weather disruption has left an aircraft at the wrong airport or when it needs to be moved to or from a maintenance base, for example. I have flown an empty airliner only a handful of times. Even before departure, the idea that no passengers will join us is discouraging. The redcap may shrug when they meet us on such days. Their work is, of course, much easier without passengers, but they do not appear to like it, either.
Flights with no passengers are often flights with no cabin crew either, and so one of the pilots must help close the door on the empty and silent main deck, before heading upstairs to join their colleagues in the cockpit. Opening or closing an aircraft door safely is not entirely straightforward, and until my first flight on an empty aircraft I had never actually opened or closed a 747 door other than during annual training exercises, practicing with flight attendants on an aircraft mock-up, on a door to nowhere. Takeoff on an empty plane is different, too. The jet feels unnaturally light. The absence of passengers is measured in tens of tons, a rare reminder not only of the size of airliners, but of the physicality, the take-this-up-there mechanics of flight.
On an empty flight it is a pilot who must walk through the cabin to conduct the routine safety checks that are normally performed by the cabin crew. On the 747, this means a long and lonely walk away from my one or two colleagues in the cockpit, downstairs and all the way back, past hundreds of empty seats that may be dressed and ready—magazines, toothbrushes, and headsets laid out—for the passengers that are not there.
I’m on an empty aircraft, flying from San Francisco to London. Among the three pilots I am allocated the first break, and I choose to take it in a comfortable seat in the cabin downstairs, rather than in the cockpit bunk, because I’ve never had the experience of dozing in the entirely untenanted volume of a 747’s passenger cabin. Humming to myself, I prepare a luxuriant bed in the nose of the jet, more a nest really, from the all-but-unlimited supply of blankets and pillows. I think of the vast cells of the cargo holds below me, which are nearly full tonight with the computer and biotechnology equipment and fresh fruit and vegetables that are the fingerprint of the California valleys and industrial parks we overflew on departure. Outside I can see the peaks of the snowcapped Sierra Nevadas streaming past in the gathering dusk. But breaks are short enough without sightseeing, and so I lie down to sleep.
What I hear next is the wake-up call at the end of my break. On a normal flight this would be a chime in the bunk area triggered remotely by the other pilots, a pleasant enough noise that is nevertheless burned into every long-haul pilot’s brain as the last thing we want to hear interrupting our dreams. On this empty flight, however, my wake-up call takes the form of a public-address announcement, personalized to me from a colleague in the cockpit, broadcast to the hundreds of empty seats and one lonely pilot who suddenly bolts upright in a corner of the forward cabin.
It takes me much longer than the usual sleepy moment to realize where I am. The plane has been flying toward the night of the north and the east, and so it is dark outside and nearly dark inside as well. Scattered oval pools of cold moonlight spread across the cabin floor and roll gently back and forth over the carpet with the sway of the vessel in the high wind. No curtains are drawn between the cabins, and as I look down the full length of the main deck, only a few splashes of light dot the shadowy abstraction of the aisles.
Another copilot once told me about a flight he made on a large aircraft, undergoing tests, that had no interior features yet—no seats, no galleys, no divisions between cabins or decks. He said that, from inside, you could see the fuselage flex and twist in response to the maneuvers of ordinary flight. There’s no reason I would be able to see this tonight, but in the near-darkness it’s somehow what I’m looking for as I peer down the full length of the empty plane.
I sit in my pajamas on the cabin floor, contemplating for a moment the white noise of the engines and the uninterrupted length of this ghost ship, this peculiar library of numbered and lettered vacancies that we have made and lifted above the low world, that is even now heaving itself forward toward the Arctic.
The phrase souls on board comes to mind, an antiquated term that is still heard in aviation when an air-traffic controller, for example, wishes to know the total number of persons, passengers and crew on an aircraft. Many tens of thousands of passengers and crew have flown on this plane and will fly on it; no one who saw only the map of us, the far-scattered constellation of our present locations on the earth, would ever guess that what we had in common was one airplane. I change out of my pajamas in front of the banks of unshuttered windows, which for once open onto a night no less lonely than that inside the cabin.
I walk upstairs and make my way carefully down the dark aisle of the upper deck. The cockpit door has been open the entire flight—there is no reason to close it tonight—and from the end of the upper-deck cabin the softly glowing cockpit screens are as welcoming as a hearth. I walk past the empty seats and through the open door. The mug of tea my colleagues have made for me is steaming in a cupholder by my seat. As I walk in I say: Guess who? And the captain laughs, because tonight there is no one else in the world it could be.
Night
I’m in the cockpit of an airliner at Heathrow that’s about to depart to Budapest. I’ve been an airline pilot for about a year, flying Airbus jets like this one to cities across Europe. All over the continent, the routes, the alignments of the waiting runways, the hotels where we sleep and the cafés where we meet for breakfast, the Europe-shaped maps formed of such places, are no longer new to me. Yet this flight feels as important as any in my life, as momentous as my first flight in a light aircraft as a teenager, my first solo flight in the skies of Arizona, or my first flight on an airliner, because my dad is onboard.
Or at least, he will be soon. The captain and I are on a tour, multiple flights over several days, each of which will end in the evening of a different city. We’ve been taking turns flying each leg. This is my leg—of course it must be, said the captain when I told him that my dad would be onboard. I’ve done the walk-around, the flight plan is loaded, our checks are complete, the cargo doors are closed, the pushback crew is below the plane, ready to roll. Nearly all the passengers are onboard. But I haven’t seen my dad yet. I have a sudden awareness that, unlike every other occasion in my life that one of us has waited for the other, tonight there is no question of waiting.
It’s December, not long before Christmas. My dad has been in England for about a week. A few days ago we went to walk around Cambridge on a dark and frosty not-quite-day and somehow were offered seats at the Carols from King’s College concert that would be broadcast on Christmas Eve. We sat in the chapel under the great stained-glass windows, mostly the work of Flemish glaziers, and under another Flemish masterpiece, Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi. My dad will stay longer in Budapest than I will; then he’ll head to Belgium, to Flanders, to visit his siblings and their families.
Suddenly I see him. He’s one of the last passengers to step onto the aircraft. He is speaking to one of the crew in the galley. The flight attendant brings him to the cockpit and I introduce him to the captain, one of the most senior in the company at the time, who smiles as my dad takes my picture in front of the con
trols. I explain a few of the buttons and systems to him, show him the digital map of our route. Though now a naturalized American, he is proud, I think, that I have started my career on a European airliner.
We hear the muffled ka-thump of the main cabin door closing, a starter gun familiar to waiting airline pilots everywhere. I reach for my headset, a little embarrassed that I have to ask my dad to leave the cockpit and go to his seat. I close and bolt the cockpit door. I call the controllers to ask for departure clearance. I speak to the pushback crew below the plane, enacting my side of a formal conversation that’s specified, word for word, in our manuals. “Brakes released,” I say. “Are we clear to start engines?” I ask, as we begin to move backward. “Clear to start number two,” responds the voice from below. The cockpit quiets as airflow is diverted away to the engines, a silence that gives way to an accelerating hum as the captain lights the engine under the right-hand wing. The left-hand column of my handwritten logbook records this moment: “Departure from Heathrow, 19:44.”
It’s been dark for hours already at this time of year. We taxi out, enjoying one of the pleasures of Heathrow at night that few other airports offer, a system of green and red taxiway lights that echoes the voice instructions of the controllers and visually directs our path across the airfield. There is no delay when we reach the runway. I set takeoff power. We accelerate and lift away from London, climbing over the southeast of England, passing Dover and the Channel Tunnel’s long approach roads and vast rail yards. Tunnels, of all things, are easy to see at night. A bouquet of light paths fans out from a point, as the narrowly confined journeys spread in their newfound freedom on the land. We cross the Channel. Minutes later we cross the far coast and I realize suddenly that I am flying my dad over his homeland.
On this clear winter night we pass Ostend, then Bruges, where he studied. I think of The Nun’s Story, the Audrey Hepburn movie. Her character traveled from a convent next door to where my father lived in Bruges, to the Congo, where he too would later move. When the director Fred Zinnemann arrived in the Congo, he picked the choir my father had started in the colony to sing onscreen. So from behind the camera my father conducted his choir, the other nuns, and Hepburn herself, and then he did it all again when Zinnemann noticed that the waving shadows of my father’s hands had fallen on the white habits. Next is Ghent, on the left. Then it’s me—on the right, and privileged with the near-darkness of the cockpit that renders the night land outside as bright as any of our computer screens—who sees my dad’s small hometown set among the lights of Flanders.
Belgium, for all its light, is gone in a matter of minutes. Soon we’re over southern Germany; then we pass near Linz, Vienna, Bratislava, following the Danube across the illuminated tapestry of Europe. I think of Europe so often in terms of its peripheral or coastal lands, but flights like this one remind me that just as I may think of Missouri or Kansas as iconically American, so, too does Europe have its heartlands, the central and inland places where culture and geography each lend much of their weight to the other. Ahead now are the lights of Budapest. We make a languid arc to the south of the city, then turn back to the northwest to make our approach to the easterly of the two parallel runways.
Like London, like Brussels and Vienna, like everywhere we saw tonight, Budapest is cold and clear. Not a breath of wind is sensed by the flight computers as we start the final approach and extend the flaps. I remember that my dad is onboard and I wonder for which one of us this experience is more unexpected. My dad sometimes said he wished he had become a scientist. I have a flicker of sadness about the rules that mean I can’t show him this view of the lights that lead to and mark the runway. He would love the way they look: technical but majestic.
A green bar that may edge out sideways, in wing bars, marks the beginning of the runway itself—the threshold, the liminal rite cast up in light. Before the lights of the runway itself come the approach lights. When it comes to approach lights, there are many schools of thought. Each runway’s complicated arrangement is identified on our charts by diagrams and acronyms that barely simplify them. Sometimes a stream of strobe lights races toward the runway—a running rabbit, as if airliners were greyhounds on a track. Some approach-light arrays are more than half a mile long and extend out far into open water, where their lanterned purpose appears more likely to be nautical than aerial. Sometimes, in mist or snow at night, particularly if the airport is surrounded by water, then for several minutes the runway lights can be all we see of the approaching world. Their patterns create a glorious visual momentum; long streams point and narrow toward the runway, cut by arrowing crossbars. Precision blooms in the windscreen.
As we descend toward Budapest the plane starts to speak to us. “TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED,” it calls out. We lower the gear. The glittering patterns of lights, the lampposts of the returning world, are no longer only ahead of us; we are among them; they are streaming directly under the nose. By some grand luck, some pleasing and memorable coincidence of air and family, the landing is one of the smoothest I’ve ever made. We taxi to the gate, read the shutdown checklist. I complete the entry in my logbook: “Arrival in Budapest, 22:02. Dad onboard.”
When flying is spoken of in cultural or emotional terms, the sky is almost always light. The loveliest break with this rule—Saint-Exupéry’s Night Flight—describes a lower sky and a lower-wattage world, wonders that remain accessible to the intrepid pilots of small planes over rural or wild places but rarely to the modern air traveler, for whom it is easy to forget to look out at night. From an airliner the night world is more subtle than the day version, even from a dark cabin, and it’s certainly harder to photograph. And passengers who fly at night are often asleep or hoping to be.
But whether as a pilot or a passenger, I much prefer to fly at night. There is a delicacy that’s the opposite of the solar glare we must shield ourselves against, with sunglasses and elaborate phalanxes of sunshades that on long daylight flights migrate like the faces of sunflowers around the cockpit. Night flights are often smoother, too, without the sun to raise heat and turbulence from the earth’s surface.
The sense that in taking flight we leave behind the small concerns and low ceilings of daily life is markedly stronger at night. In conversation we may speak too negatively of a “dark night of the soul.” The poem by St. John of the Cross is not about despair but about a love that we can see more clearly at night, when the navigation light on the wing, rising over the sleeping lands and cities, may recall the “lantern bright” in one version of the poem; and, in another version, the night beauty of journeys that begin “in darkness…my house being wrapt in sleep.”
In the high night, too, are many phenomena we cannot see so clearly, if we see them at all, when the sun is up. There are nameless ships of cloud that seem to sail best under a bright moon. There are vast lobes of lightning, flashbulbing out from deep within the gray matter of distant equatorial thunderstorms, while on the windowpanes St. Elmo’s fire, a kind of static that appears in startling bursts of flat blue veins, flickers like Prufrock’s “nerves in patterns on a screen.” There are the empty, passing lands directly below us, dark and almost as far from us in our imaginations as the heavens. There are the flames, both man-made and natural, and more than we would ever imagine. And there are the illuminated manuscripts of cities and small places—the book they make of our lights under the dark-fallen hours, as if flight had been granted only to help us remember that there is a grace to the lights we place on the world; to remind us that everything we know is embowered by stars.
—
It was once said that the British Empire spanned so much of the globe that the sun would never set on it. An Indian-born professor of mine in college, when he found out I was moving to Britain, warned that after a few wintry weeks in the heart of the former empire I might find myself wondering whether the sun had ever risen on it. On the ground, sunset is often an unsatisfactory affair, affected or obliterated entirely by clouds, pollution, and weather, and f
urther handicapped by the fact that, unless we are sailors or farmers, we rarely have a clear view both down to and along the horizon. Indeed, on an overcast day there is often no sign that either the earth or the unseen source of its illumination are celestial bodies. The sky gradually darkens in a generalized and directionless fade from damp gray to wet black.
By contrast, in the sky at high altitude, the coming of darkness is almost always pristine. Nearly every sunset I have seen in the sky would make me stop in my tracks if I saw it from the surface of the earth. It is an advantage of the profession an aspiring pilot may not have stopped to consider, that every sunset will be so perfect that we might roll our eyes if we saw its like on a postcard.
Flight also offers us an opportunity to both scramble and unveil the mechanics of our light and our sphere. Darkness comes to an airliner early or late. It may last unnaturally long, or it may come only in part before starting its retreat. Often darkness does not come at all. Night, on the ground, is experienced as time—nighttime, we call it. In the sky, the intrigues of darkness appear more sensible if we imagine night as a space—a geography of shadow that we can race toward or flee from, at speeds fast enough to accelerate the turning of the day or to all but hold the hands of a clock in place.
We might picture what we learned once in school but now may only rarely consider: the earth floating in the light of the sun. Using an apple and a flashlight can help remind us that at every moment the back of the planet is dark and the front is light. The two halves meet in a continuous belt around the earth where day and night are always beginning or ending, a great ring of light-meeting-dark. This ring is sometimes called the terminator, but the line is as much a beginning of light as an end. Along the ring it is always dawn or dusk—the names of two of Isak Dinesen’s Scotch deerhounds, incidentally, who when they accompanied her on safari would scatter the game like “all the stars of heaven running wild over the sky.”
Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot Page 24