“Treviso radar. India Echo November for a qudimike.”
“India Echo November, your QDM’s one zero eight. Drifting slightly to south. Nine miles from VOR.”
Nine miles, that is, at current speed, two and a half minutes; you had further reduced speed, unwittingly, not so much because of the turbulence as because of an illusion that you needed room for manoeuvre, or evasion, in the face of some unexpected obstacle; be sincere, you still don’t trust instruments, and perhaps not the Air Traffic Control people or the satellites either, so you keep to a speed just above the stalling speed you had dropped to earlier on. How odd that around the same time you had twice come across the same images of an aeroplane stalling; the identical photo taken in a wind chamber of a spiral of air whirling on a wing top had appeared both in aeronautical handbooks, where it was depicted as the most appalling of events, the worst that could befall a pilot and thus to be avoided at all costs, and in up-to-date physics textbooks, where it was exalted as a remarkable example of Chaos theory; certainly you were honoured that a stall was considered by contemporary thought as a “critical point phenomenon,” and that in the white vapour indicating the separation of the flowing wisps of cloud and the wing top – a photographic reproduction of the uncontrollability of turbulence – some had seen the ancient consubstantiality, the ancient concurrence of order and disorder, oh yes, there was one part of you which participated enthusiastically in the wonder that a butterfly beating its wings in New York could lead to etc, etc . . . you were a lover of chance and coincidence, but you were the one beating the wings, pilot; order and disorder, separated by no more than quantity, by a curve before which and beyond which lay the realm of the one and of the other, chaos containing order containing chaos, rather like the white, green and yellow curves in your instruments which indicated stalling speeds, the curve of speeds within which your aeroplane was an aeroplane, but under and over which it was so no longer. Your job was to remain lord and master of those tiny confines, assuming that your wish was to get to the VOR, and perhaps even to return home.
“India Echo November, you’re over Charlie. Descend from three thousand to one thousand five hundred. Report when in visual contact with ground or water.”
“Roger.”
In no other place was the spoken word so vital as in the skies, nowhere else was it devoured with such greed. Flight had its own alphabet, a lesser alphabet like Braille or Morse, an alphabet with no ambition to coin words, a simple phonetic alphabet composed neither of symbols translating letters nor of letters making up words, but which used only common words to spell out, beyond all possibility of error, the letters of the everyday alphabet: a lexicon at the service of an alphabet and not vice versa, Bravo for B, Sierra for S, six people’s names, Juliet, Charlie, Mike, Oscar, Romeo and Victor, two dances, the fox-trot and the tango, two nations, Quebec and India, one city, Lima, two ethnic groups, Yankee and Zulu, one hotel, one liqueur, one uniform, one month, November, to represent the rest, one clinical analysis, the x-ray. A spoken alphabet, so ordered to deny anyone the liberty to indicate a letter by a favourite activity of their own, perhaps F for Flamenco rather than Fox-trot, the dance which, together with the Tango, had always been considered the only dance acknowledged by radio operators throughout the world. Although at the beginning this language had seemed to you overblown and extravagant, you had gradually come to appreciate its value; it had to be precise every time, since, uniquely, there would never be a second chance for correcting error or misunderstanding. The most unreal of languages, with the maximum of density in the minimum of words, embodying the maximum of imagination, each word having to designate instantaneously a geography of trajectories, positions, intentions, of starting points and destinations, as now, when Air Traffic Control mentions another flight coming up on your radio beacon, asks if you were listening, if you copied, if you understood. Words with consequences, then, dealing with matters of life and death and requiring a high quotient of intellectual honesty; any attempt at lying would immediately cause Air Traffic Control to abandon the procedural jargon and come out with a direct – “You sure?” Your message had invariably the same structure, who you are, where you are coming from and going to, where you are when speaking, where you will call from next and when; the reply from Air Traffic Control was of the same standard type – I know where you are, I know where you are bound, this is your position and this is the position of other planes, here is what you have to do, here is where I am expecting you to check in next. Sometimes, talking into the radio in flight, the line would go dead, you stopped receiving replies, and there would be no knowing at which end the breakdown had occurred; you then found yourself obliged to issue blind messages, messages launched into the air, the procedure to be followed when, receiving no reply, not hearing a voice, you could not be sure if someone was hearing you and you were not receiving him, or if it was your radio that was no longer transmitting.
“India Echo November? Why have you not commenced descent?”
I’ll tell you why. It’s because to break through clouds or fog from above is always frightening, especially in the early days, so it’s easier to circle over the VOR, maintaining your altitude. You stare at the dots and hands on the instruments as they rotate or disappear, you want to be totally certain, the radio beacon is a platform of cement and aerials at sea level, situated on a strip of coastline, you will make a vertical, circle by circle, descent.
“Treviso radar, India Echo November. We’re circling over Charlie.”
“Go ahead, circle, circle . . .”
And you circled, circled, exiting from the clouds in concentric circles, as you had ascended so you would descend, five hundred feet a minute; clouds in painting had always had the function of linking or separating heaven and earth, a curtain or a lift, it all depended, someone might emerge from the clouds to speak, or someone might ascend from down there. What a problem clouds presented! When the Chinese wanted to paint them, they filled their mouths with white powder and blew on a sky previously sketched in ink on the page, as though the portrait had to be made of the same material as the subject.
“India Echo November, you back in Victor Mike Charlie?”
“India Echo November? Can you see . . .” Air Traffic Control’s voice rang out again.
You had eyes only for the altimeter, five hundred, four hundred, three hundred.
The sea appeared quite suddenly at the end of the last circle, and alongside it the city and your final destination, more glittering and bright than it had ever appeared to you before.
SIX
Flight Manoeuvres
TO KNOW EVERYTHING, indeed more than everything, and to transform that knowledge into natural gestures which can be acted on instantly and instinctively, but not too instinctively; to have knowledge to the point that it becomes movement of the hand, sensitivity of the fingers to instruments and sensitivity of the body to positions in space, kinetics. To know, but not to know too much, and not to be oversure of that knowledge, because error, lying in wait for any display of cockiness, is always ready to pounce. Error was the pilot’s speciality, and your discipline and chosen subject. If there was one expertise reserved for the pilot, it was expertise in error. What did you say your business was? Error, sir, nothing but error.
Words like “kinetics” would never have crossed Bruno’s lips. He would never have spoken to you of such things, indeed would never have spoken of them at all, not to anyone, but would certainly have expected you to have a grasp of them. There was no inapplicable idea in the whole gamut from aerodynamic equations to advice to navigators, Notams read at the last minute before take-off warning of possible temporary dangers, no idea at all however abstract or doltish, however remote in the recesses of memory, that might not be of use. There was no such thing as primary or secondary notions; there was no hierarchy in a pilot’s knowledge, any more than in error itself; on the contrary, error took a strongly democratic and egalitarian view of guilt. From its point of view, neglect of
a fundamental principle was in every sense equivalent to neglect of a trifling exception to the grammar of flight. There were, then, no primary or secondary errors, but you had a serendipitous flair for committing errors of both types, with equal success. In life, to choose the wrong wife or the wrong lift was conventionally viewed as being matters of varying gravity, but in piloting an aircraft an act of petty oversight, which in day-to-day life would rank with forgetting an umbrella, could, due to the obvious but decisive fact that in flight there can be no stopping, be fatal. There may be perfect reversibility in space but not in time, so you could scarcely ever have a second chance at some failed procedure, or at some unsuccessful or overlooked manoeuvre. In no case would you have the liberty of stopping in mid-air to attend to something you should have seen to on the ground. It was your habit to try out the brakes as you lined up the plane for take-off, because you would not have occasion to use them again until landing at your destination and, if you had failed to perform the due tests earlier on, it was only at that point, as you pushed down the pedals and the plane careered off the runway in spite of the pressure of your feet, that you would discover whether or not they were in working order. An aircraft had something ballistic about it, you could go anywhere, but the flight would in any case complete its own destiny, and that destiny was invariably earth-to-earth, irrespective of the bodily form in which you arrived.
Bruno could never be persuaded to talk about these matters, or if pressed, would reply with a few laconic verbs in the infinitive, and that only at table where the infinitives could be spaced out between silent mouthfuls. Bruno carried, etched in his mind, a detailed map of airports, flight paths and radio beacons, with another map superimposed on it, this time of the restaurants of Italy, with the result that during a flight, quite out of the blue, he was liable to announce – let’s land here – and that “here” would be a tiny airstrip scarcely identifiable in the surrounding grass, at Lugo di Romagna, at Thiene, at Massa Cinquale or at Busto Arsizio where he was born, but never far from the goal, which was a trattoria he was especially fond of. However, even a humble broth cooked by engineers on a primus stove in a hangar, on grey and rainy days, would arouse his interest but not disturb his silences. After the meal, once the rain went off, Bruno would move out of his office like a village elder, lean a seat against the side of a petrol pump and sit there communing with the clouds and the air. You, meantime, were left to walk the deserted apron, waiting for the sky to clear, losing yourself in lengthy imaginary conversations which this impossible relationship prevents you from having man to man; you would say to him – look Bruno, when you, in mid-air, pull back the levers and say calmly “engine emergency” and reach your hand over my control column to switch off the magneto and stop the propeller, you leave me only a moment to stare, petrified, at that immobile sword on the horizon, before I set my mind to doing what requires to be done. The silence in the cockpit is noisier than a voice, but you don’t speak, you don’t even check my movements, you sense them from our trim, from the way I manoeuvre to bring you slowly in to land, from how I let the plane and our bodies drift in the search for the best angle, from how I give rein or else rein in. During afternoons like this, while awaiting take-off, I go over in my mind all the stalls, turns and spins, and perhaps I am now better equipped to attempt them, look at the loops and spins I can master now! Every evening, I am the last to leave the airfield, taking away with me all that I acquired during a day of practice in falls and lost equilibrium, or if you prefer, of equilibrium in extreme situations. I would like to be able to apply this equilibrium somewhere else, Bruno – are there such things as life manoeuvres? – but will I ever be able to talk to you about it, and if so how? There you are seated against a petrol pump like a cat beside a radiator, your arms folded, staring at the cement of the crumbling parade with roots and herbs breaking the surface all around; it is an old, tired airfield, who knows what you’re waiting for on afternoons like this. At times, in these old airfields, all those who ever failed to reach their destination seem to be huddled there, now invisible, luggage clasped in hand, waiting for relatives to collect them, exactly as once, who knows when?, those relatives had awaited with growing despair the arrival of the loved ones who would never appear. But this is only one of many, dreadful instances of never meeting again. If I had ever managed to discuss such innocuous hallucinations with you, Bruno, they would surely have found their way onto my medical record, or perhaps not. Do you ever think of what it would be like if it were possible to behave in life as in flying, of what would happen if the same reversibility could be produced in life? In flying, everything is based on the circularity of the compass, every point can be viewed in two opposing perspectives, every calculation in navigation has its opposite calculation, each reference point constitutes a choice not of value but of position, and one easily overturned; we navigate by distance from, with instruments which indicate the route travelled from our starting point, and we navigate by approach to, with instruments which home in on the destination, on the point of arrival. In flying, our teleology functions equally well in reverse; it does not designate exclusively movement to but also movement, or distancing, from, even if our sensation is not of a mere “past” but rather of a lead wire, a “track”, starting somewhere behind us and hauling us in some direction as it unwinds; teleology is that red needle I see every day turning in the instrument glass, flying about as it pursues radials in all directions, moving from a point I am at complete liberty to consider the point of departure or arrival. The needle will carry the word “to” or “from”, everything is relative, moveable words for departure or approach, and when it does not indicate “to” or “from”, the needle says simply “off”, too distant to be able to pick up any signal. I would relish the liberty of freely choosing – in life too – a beam and travelling along it, no matter whether “to” or “from”; a signal from a radio beacon can, in any case, go in only one direction, from its own source outwards, from the radio beacon itself towards the infinite, like a coastal warning light; the signal is, then, bound to indicate origin, it can never be other than a “from” signal, so I could wing my way towards it, except that, in such a case, the needle’s indications would be inverted, or as you would say, Bruno, “anti-instinctive”. North is north, although it is not the only one, it is simply a reference point, every degree on the compass enjoys equal dignity, every spot on the earth’s surface is simultaneously journey’s end and journey’s beginning, transposed from time to time, as the occasion demands. If I could only accept that all that matters is the individual section, or “stretch” as you prefer to name all journeys, and could reject all forms of nostalgia for departure or arrival; or else if only I could face the knowledge that departure and arrival can often be the same thing, can coincide. Perhaps, Bruno, that is ultimately why we fly, to gain that meagre satisfaction which can be derived, on each occasion, from departure-cum-arrival, from arriving in the very act of departure, and from the idea of having accomplished at least this. It seems that something has been done, even if that something is to be measured in mere miles. (All this has been said in so many books, by so many experts and scribblers with no experience of aeronautics, but I have never managed to apply it in life without a residue of pain and nostalgia. These are matters which can be savoured in the mind but never assimilated in the depths of one’s being; only when flying do they come to me naturally, because they are the very structure and necessity of flight, nor could it be otherwise.)
You know, Bruno, there are so many things I delude myself I could learn from here, from this old airfield; here every situation has its set procedure, you demonstrate it, or leave it to each of us to pick it up and repeat it until it becomes instinctive, but not too instinctive. Take night flights; you taught us that in observing city lights, or outlines or prominent, illuminated points it was essential to keep looking down or to one side, like bashful or coquettish maidens, so that things would appear as they are and not as they present themselves when
viewed from off-centre; in night flights, you said, resist the temptation to stare at the lights. To see things in their real dimensions in poor light or at night, it is advisable to take a sideways look, to use what you call “peripheral vision”. I have no trouble doing that in flight, Bruno, but in life? I continue to look at things head-on, frontally, and am crushed by the vision; I stare at it transfixed, so that one scene, one memory or one obsession blots out the entire panorama. Somewhere there must surely be a periphery to vision from which everything can be brought back into focus, a manoeuvre of the eye which allows it to outflank obstacles and restore a sense of proportion, but for me it has never been easy to find. (I am starting to think that being crushed in that way may serve a purpose, may be of cumulative value, may make a rhythm, but, aeronautically, operationally, you could never agree.) In aviation, there is scarcely anything direct; to be centred and immediate, everything requires to have been previously adjusted and compensated for, so that if it is in the centre, its position is due to a deliberate, prior decentring and displacement. If I fly into gusts or cross-winds I must set the nose into the wind, into the direction the wind is coming from, veering perhaps as much as thirty or forty degrees off course; the direction is no longer the one I wish to follow but it is only by navigating off course that I can stay on course and keep to my flight path. And this decentring caused by wind patterns at height is only part of a more complex, careful dislocation; to get to my destination, I navigate according to the difference between three norths – magnetic north, geographic north and the north given by the cockpit compass as influenced by the metals in the aircraft itself. Each north has to be added to, or subtracted from, the others, from my route, as well as from the final number which I will follow on the gyroscopes, wagering everything on that number; like a gambler. To reach the destination, I set the nose in a wholly different direction, following an imaginary route which goes somewhere else, to a place which exists exclusively in terrestrial magnetism, in calculation and in the wind. I have no other means at my disposal for coinciding with my destination.
Take-Off Page 10