Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot

by Mark Vanhoenacker

  Sometimes what appear to be such flashes from a plane at a great distance may in fact be a star or planet scintillating through a long slice of the atmosphere. This effect gives rise to stories of strange sightings and the old pilot’s tale of the captain who says to his copilot, who has just flashed the landing lights at what he thinks is an approaching aircraft: Got friends on Venus, have you, son?

  I see the reciprocity of the landing lights, this warm yet lonely gesture, most often on flights from London to Cape Town, when we may encounter an opposite-directioned aircraft from our airline, as if each airplane had taken to the sky only to serve as a milepost of light to the other. The term company ship evokes the old Union-Castle liners that would leave Southampton and the Cape on the same day each week and pass each other at sea.

  High above those waters, while nearly everyone else onboard sleeps, I see the lights of our company ship. I reach up for the pair of landing-light switches on the overhead panels, and the beams from the wings, though only pinpricks in the expanse of the night, salute the opposite vessel as its lights race up and over our windshield. Nothing is said on the radio, and the greeting takes place so quickly I do not even move my hand from the switches. The wings go dark again under the ice-field of African stars and our two jets arc silently past, each bound for morning in the city the other has left.

  Return

  I’m in the center of Tokyo. The trip into town from our hotel in Narita is a tough one to make in daylight, a swim against a strong tide of jet lag, but it means that my colleagues and I will see something of the city that brought us here and that we will all sleep well tonight. We are walking to a few sights I remember from my short stay in Tokyo in school, when I was on my way to my summer homestay in Kanazawa, and from my business trips to the city later.

  We enter the vast plaza of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building, under the twin skyscrapers that opened a few months before my first visit. The group of fellow pupils I’d joined for that summer adventure was supervised by a twenty-something graduate student from California. She wanted to open our eyes to the world around us. “Wherever you go, there you are,” was her favored expression. It struck me then, when the journey was from rural Massachusetts to a country I never thought I’d visit. Now, a decade and a half later, I smile when I think of her words, which articulate the problem of place lag and serve as a kind of incantation against it.

  My colleagues and I flew a 747 here this morning, and now we are checking our maps, laughing, looking for a place for lunch. Two days from now we will be heading northwest over Siberia; heading home.

  Under the midday light of this distant city, walking and laughing with people I did not know yesterday, I try to picture my slower self, the one whose Stone Age pace and horizons we are all born with. He hasn’t left London yet; he is puttering around at home. He doesn’t even have a passport; he won’t fly, ever. He can’t conceive of any distance he has not walked himself or seen across an open field or valley. When I get home in less than two days I will meet him, perhaps as he is saying farewell to the apartment; he will be wearing his backpack full of everything he thinks he might need, his sturdiest shoes. I will meet him on the landing outside as I come up the steps. “You don’t need any of that. I’m back now,” I’ll say, and I’ll walk past him and take my headphones out of my ears, throw my passport onto a shelf, turn the radio on, put my feet up on the couch, and flip through the mail.

  My colleagues and I wander down a side street in Tokyo. We find a small restaurant and have some deep-fried dumplings for lunch. We head back into the sun and I attempt to ask a passerby for directions to the Meiji Shrine.

  On the flight from London I asked one of the cabin crew to help me make an announcement in Japanese. I’ve had to write this out longhand. My language skills have faded in the years since I studied here, to the point that the outlines of the sentences I can no longer form on my own are little more than a phantom linguistic limb. When I first started to fly to Japan as a pilot I was saddened to discover the extent of this loss. I reassured myself that with just a few weeks here I would surely recover nearly all that I’d lost of the Japanese language; I could feel it beginning to return, even in the first day or two. But now I know I won’t ever have enough time here to find those words and characters again, at least not with work. I know that a few weeks from now I will have returned to London, then traveled to São Paulo and on to Delhi, where I’ll have heard other languages, on other streets.

  The language my job has given me—words and names relating to the plane itself, the new geographies of the sky, and the small or far places on the earth I never before knew of—does not replace this. But it has its moments. There is, too, a kind of sign language in aviation which, in the absence of voice contact, allows someone on the ground to indicate to pilots of a moving plane to stop, go straight ahead, turn left or right, or enables a pilot to indicate to ground staff that the brakes are set or that an engine is about to start. These gestures, which echo the semaphores of flags and paddles used to communicate between ships, are internationally standardized. They are drawn and diagrammed with arrows in our manuals to show exactly how the hands must move, on pages that remind me of the sign-language instruction materials my mother used in her speech-therapy practice.

  Other gestures are not written out. When a plane departs, a member of the ground staff often gives us a thumbs-up or waves to us, and such a moment is as good an opportunity as any to uncouple words like farewell, or to linger on the God-be-with-you etymology of good-bye. Often in Japan the ground staff, safely distant from the 747, face the jet and bow to it as we start our journey home.

  —

  We reach the Meiji Shrine and walk through the regal wooden gate, to which visitors bow as they enter. I have always liked the ceremonial gates that mark a transition between a city, a temple, or a castle, and whatever lies beyond their borders. On one of my trips to Japan, a German resident in Tokyo listed for me some German words that have traveled to Japanese, including arubaito, meaning part-time work, from Arbeit, and Enerugii, energy, with a telltale hard g. I had recently learned the Japanese word for certain gates, torii, and I asked him if it could possibly have some link to the German Tor. It does not, he said—torii means abode of birds, and in both Europe and Japan the concept is too old; it predates the cultural and linguistic transmission lines across Eurasia erected by ships and now, of course, maintained by airplanes.

  There’s something about gate that lifts a place-name from the surrounding map, that embeds a name into the grain of a place, into the long miles and years of geography and history that surround it. Walking the cities of the world, or resting in a café, reading about a place overflown the night before, a pilot comes across many stately gate names, whether derived from the man-made or natural entranceways to cities: the implausibly ancient-looking gate of Fort Canning, in Singapore; the Golden Gate of Istanbul; or, indeed, the Golden Gate of San Francisco or the Lions Gate of Vancouver and the bridges named for them. I like the new bridge over Tokyo Bay near Haneda Airport almost as much as its name, the Tokyo Gate Bridge. In the mountains of Turkey stand the Syrian Gates, a high pass I’ve occasionally flown near, through which, a colleague once told me, Alexander the Great marched.

  Travelers may find gates named not for where they stand, but for where they lead, to be particularly beguiling. The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin led to the city of Brandenburg an der Havel, from which the state of Brandenburg took its name. Fittingly, this name, which foreigners may most associate with the gate in the heart of Berlin, was recently bestowed on the German capital’s new airport. On my first morning ever in Delhi, I saw the India Gate on a city map and jumped on the subway to go and visit it; then, once in the train, I nearly changed course when I saw signs for the Kashmere Gate. Sometimes the gate names spread to the surrounding neighborhood and endure long after the original gate has gone, such as with the Toranomon, or Tiger’s Gate, in Tokyo, once the south gate of Edo Castle. London place-names
hardly get better than Bishopsgate and Moorgate, which now survive not as structures but as the sonorous legacy of the Roman-era London Wall.

  When I regularly flew to Paris, now and again I thought of gates, and airports, as I rode into the city through the Porte—the Gate—de la Chapelle. I like to imagine that this long heritage of gates gives a flicker of grandeur to the word as it is used today—merely numbered or lettered—in airports. Gates are exactly what these are—transitional spaces between the airplanes and the airport, that can be locked and opened. What we walk through to enter the modern city. America’s once-great railway stations, the airports of a previous era, drew lofty comparisons to the gates of medieval towns. I don’t speak Norwegian, which may be one reason that the word for customs—toll, which I read after flights to Oslo’s beautiful and modern airport—so often evoked the sense of a formal passage through a city wall.

  I have never flown the inaugural flight on a new route, but the traditional welcome given to an airplane on such a flight is a gate made by the airport fire brigade, who launch arches of white water for the airplane to taxi under, a ceremony whose components—water, an arch—feel archetypal, certainly much older and simpler than the fire engines that produce it might suggest. As for when we disembark from an airliner and wander into a terminal, it’s perhaps too much to think of a portcullis rising or flags snapping in the wind under the gaze of elaborately dressed guards. Yet medieval travelers, too, would surely have been bleary-eyed and hungry. We forget that some of our greatest and most modern airports, those enormous glass-and-steel structures designed by the leading architects of our time, will one day look old-fashioned. We can’t know now what nostalgia they will conjure, what romance for a former age of journeys and cities—our age of journeys and cities—they will someday embody.

  Before we land, pilots must pass through gates in the sky. In physics at school I learned about the potential energy a bowling ball has at rest, high on a shelf, say, and the kinetic energy it has racing across a floor. An airplane at cruising altitude has plenty of both—height above the ground, speed through the air. Yet by the time it has parked at a gate thirty minutes later, effectively it has neither: it is not moving forward, and it has no stored-up height.

  Pilots must reduce a plane’s altitude in reference to other aircraft, obstructions on the ground, the published approaches to runways, and the instructions of air-traffic controllers. The plane’s speed must comply with the requests of controllers, who are tasked with making the most effective use of their airspace and runways, and with more general speed limits; just as automotive speed limits drop when you approach a built-up area or town, in much of the world there are speed limits that apply to all aircraft below a certain altitude. Most importantly of all, a plane’s speed must be neither too fast nor too slow at touchdown. The wings of a modern airliner are so efficient that the more typical problem is too much speed, not too little. The process of giving or trading away all this height and speed is aptly known as energy management; it is one of the more challenging tasks for the pilots of an airliner.

  Sometimes I hear it said of a type of airplane that it is slippery or that it can go down or slow down; the implication is that it can only do one of these well at a time. This is a compliment, meaning that the airplane and its wings are well designed; it is also a warning that it can be harder to manage such a jet’s energy.

  In order to ensure that the energy is correct at touchdown, we back these requirements up into the sky, not in the information-age sense of making a copy of them, but in the physical sense of moving them earlier in time and place. At these fixed points in the approach we articulate—out loud, to each other—whether we are too high or too low, too fast or too slow. These points in the sky are known as gates: places we can pass through only under certain conditions. We may distinguish between soft gates—suggestions on the day that take account of the weather, our weight, the winds—and hard gates through which we must not pass unless the aircraft’s energy, among other factors, is appropriate for the remaining distance to the runway.

  Planes slow down before landing for the simple reason that a faster plane will use more runway length to stop, and runways are not infinitely long. But at a certain point a plane cannot fly any slower with wings sculpted for high and fast flight. Then we must spread the aircraft’s wings, using flaps and slats, panels that extend and lower from the back and front of the wings—a capability that is also used at takeoff, though typically to a lesser extent than at landing. Expanded wings are bigger, more curved. They’re much less efficient but allow the airplane to fly more slowly, an inefficiency that makes sense when it is time to take off or to land on a runway of limited length.

  Wings that are not expanded are clean; the process of expanding them may be called dirtying up. A helpful controller will often tell pilots to fly their minimum clean speed; they mean for us to slow down, but there is no need to be inefficient yet. The 747’s wings have seven configurations—one clean and six dirty. During the approach the expansion takes place in stages. Each stage lowers both the maximum and minimum speeds of the aircraft, and so as each stage completes we can slow down and initiate the next. The fourth of the dirty configurations is typically used for takeoff; the fifth- or sixth-dirtiest are used for landing.

  The sight of our growing wings, often accompanied by a sensation of slowing that symbolizes all we must undo for our return, is one of the pleasures of flight that’s largely reserved for passengers, who not only have the time to muse on the mechanical, carefully staged undoings of our height and speed, but also have a better view of the growing wing itself. It’s worth asking, the next time you fly, for a window seat at the trailing edge of the wing, or just behind it. The pleasure of this view before landing could hardly be simpler: here are our wings, spreading for the act of return.

  Such expanded wings are also one of the marvels of watching a plane land from the ground. If an airplane passes right over you before landing—perhaps in a traffic jam near an airport, or if you are inclined to have a picnic at a place where airplane lovers congregate for just this experience—the spread wing, the easily apparent nuts and bolts of the air-arms of our species, may be the most breathtaking thing about the moment; aside, of course, from the sight of something the size of a 747 in the air at all. Its huge curved flaps extended into the wind, its engines pressing against this new and self-created drag, it looks like the arriving bird it is—legs reaching forward, wings wide, poised for the moment to come.

  —

  I still like to look up at airplanes from the ground and to have a window seat when I fly as a passenger. Such moments remain a separate realm of experience, almost entirely distinct from the work in the cockpit. I’m generally most moved by flight not when I land an airplane myself but an hour after I’ve done so, when perhaps I’m on a freeway leaving the airport in Los Angeles and I see another airplane like mine only a few hundred feet over the ten streaming lanes of low traffic, the flash of the sunlit wings strobing over the cars. The forty-year-old me watches the landing airplane with a certain technical and aesthetic interest; the child in me can’t believe that I’ve so recently been one of the two or three people who guided an airplane in its last thunderous moments over the upturned gazes of the five-year-olds of the world.

  It’s now about an hour before landing, six or seven hours before I’ll walk through that temple gate in central Tokyo. We are plotting our passage through the gates of Tokyo’s skies; we are planning how this airplane, which has climbed ever higher since we left the surface of the world near London, will descend and slow and return.

  I make a few notes for my announcement to the passengers. I mouth through the words in Japanese before I speak. Near the end of Citizen Kane, Susan asks what time it is in New York. Eleven thirty, Kane tells her. Long-haul pilots may smile at her response: Night? Only Greenwich Mean Time is displayed in the cockpit; so as I always do, I check with a colleague to confirm my calculation of the local time at our destinati
on. The changing language of place is reflected in the form such questions take in the cockpit. What is the time “here”? I ask, rather than “there,” though we may still be 400 miles, a day’s drive, even a time zone away from our destination. Here and there, in any case, are about to meet.

  We tend to think of journeys, even air journeys, as lateral or curved endeavors, that we have moved over or around across the earth. But in the cockpit arrival has a much more vertical sensibility. At cruising altitude nearly all the world’s complicated weather is below us. During descent we enter the weather of our destination not only from the side but from above. We return to terrain, the generic term for the earth’s surface in the same way; we descend into the realm of mountains that may be beside us rather than below.

  After we have briefed the arrival—the weather; our target speeds and altitudes at the various soft and hard gates, and our actions if we fail to meet these targets; the runway; our expected taxi route after landing, which is one of the more complicated parts of many arrivals—there are typically a few quiet minutes before we are given our first descent clearance.

  When this clearance comes, we dial it into the autopilot, and at the appointed moment the engines roll to idle and the nose begins to drop. “Here we go,” says the captain. You might think that this phrase would come at the start of a journey, when we push back from the terminal, and that certainly such momentum-conjuring invocations might come at the moment we begin the takeoff roll. But I hear myself say: “Here we go,” most often near the end of a flight, at what’s called the top of descent, the point we leave the high cruise. Here we go—down into the space that is different because it is lower, down to our destination that stands beneath it all.