Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot
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Authors: Mark Vanhoenacker
Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot
Mark Vanhoenacker
ALFRED A KNOPF (2015)
Rating: ★★★★★
A poetic and nuanced exploration of the human experience of flight that reminds us of the full imaginative weight of our most ordinary journeys—and reawakens our capacity to be amazed.
The twenty-first century has relegated airplane flight—a once remarkable feat of human ingenuity—to the realm of the mundane. Mark Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot who left academia and a career in the business world to pursue his childhood dream of flight, asks us to reimagine what we—both as pilots and as passengers—are actually doing when we enter the world between departure and discovery. In a seamless fusion of history, politics, geography, meteorology, ecology, family, and physics, Vanhoenacker vaults across geographical and cultural boundaries; above mountains, oceans, and deserts; through snow, wind, and rain, renewing a simultaneously humbling and almost superhuman activity that affords us unparalleled perspectives on the planet we inhabit and the communities we form.
This Is a Borzoi Book
Published by Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright © 2015 Mark Vanhoenacker
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, a Penguin Random House company, London, in 2015.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This page
constitutes an extension of the copyright page.
Two brief quotes are adapted from “With This View, Who Needs Legroom?” which appeared on
NYTimes.com
(March 20, 2010).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vanhoenacker, Mark.
Skyfaring : a journey with a pilot / Mark Vanhoenacker.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-385-35181-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-385-35182-9 (eBook)
1. Airplanes—Piloting—Popular works. 2. Aeronautics—Popular works. I. Title.
TL710.V345 2015
629.132'52—dc23 2014041159
eBook ISBN 9780385351829
Cover photograph by Carolyn Marks Blackwood
Cover design by Carol Devine Carson
v4.1
ep
Contents
For Lois and Mark, and in memory of my parents
…Here, as everywhere else,
it is the same age. In cities, in settlements of mud,
light has never had epochs. Near the rusty harbor
around Port of Spain bright suburbs fade into words—
Maraval, Diego Martin—the highways long as regrets,
and steeples so tiny you couldn’t hear their bells,
nor the sharp exclamation of whitewashed minarets
from green villages. The lowering window resounds
over pages of earth, the canefields set in stanzas.
Skimming over an ocher swamp like a fast cloud of egrets
are nouns that find their branches as simply as birds.
It comes too fast, this shelving sense of home—
canes rushing the wing, a fence; a world that still stands as
the trundling tires keep shaking and shaking the heart.
—Derek Walcott
Author’s Note
I occasionally struggled to decide which units and terms to use in this book, as aviation itself, though otherwise so globalized, is not always consistent. For example, feet are used to measure height or altitude over most, but not all, of the world—whether or not the metric system is used by those on the ground below. Winds are usually quoted in knots—nautical miles per hour—except where they are quoted in meters per second. My own background as an American working in Britain didn’t make things any easier. In general I have tried to use either customary U.S. units or the units most commonly used in aviation. When it comes to talking about the weight—or, more precisely, the mass—of aircraft, though, I have stuck with the metric tons I’m most familiar with at work, as a metric ton (equivalent to around 2,200 pounds) is not so different from a U.S. ton (2,000 pounds).
If you have a favorite photograph from the window seat, please send it along to me via the website
Skyfaring.com
. I would love to see it.
London
October 2014
Lift
I’ve been asleep in a small, windowless room, a room so dark it’s as if I’m below the waterline of a ship. My head is near the wall. Through the wall comes the sound of steady rushing, the sense of numberless particles slipping past, as water rounds a stone in a stream, but faster and more smoothly, as if the vessel parts its medium without touch.
I’m alone. I’m in a blue sleeping bag, in blue pajamas that I unwrapped on Christmas morning several years ago and many thousands of miles from here. There is a gentle swell to the room, a rhythm of rolling. The wall of the room is curved; it rises and bends up over the narrow bed. It is the hull of a 747.
When someone I’ve just met at a dinner or a party learns that I’m a pilot, he or she often asks me about my work. These questions typically relate to a technical aspect of airplanes, or to a view or a noise encountered on a recent flight. Sometimes I’m asked where I fly, and which of these cities I love best.
Three questions come up most often, in language that hardly varies. Is flying something I have always wanted to do? Have I ever seen anything “up there” that I cannot explain? And do I remember my first flight? I like these questions. They seem to have arrived, entirely intact, from a time before flying became ordinary and routine. They suggest that even now, when many of us so regularly leave one place on the earth and cross the high blue to another, we are not nearly as accustomed to flying as we think. These questions remind me that while airplanes have overturned many of our older sensibilities, a deeper part of our imagination lingers and still sparks in the former realm, among ancient, even atavistic, ideas of distance and place, migrations and the sky.
Flight, like any great love, is both a liberation and a return. Isak Dinesen wrote in
Out of Africa:
“In the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space.” When aviation began, it was worth watching for its own sake; it was entertainment, as it still is for many children on their early encounters with it.
Many of my friends who are pilots describe airplanes as the first thing they loved about the world. When I was a child I used to assemble model airplanes and hang them in my bedroom, under a ceiling scattered with glow-in-the-dark stars, until the day skies were hardly less busy than Heathrow’s, and at night the outlines of the dark jets crossed against the indoor constellations. I looked forward to each of my family’s occasional airplane trips with an enthusiasm that rarely had much to do with wherever we were going. I spent most of my time at Disney World awaiting the moment we would board again the magical vessel that had brought us there.
At school nearly all my science projects were variations on an aerial theme. I made a hot-air balloon from paper, and sanded wings of balsa wood that jumped excitedly in the slipstream from a hairdryer, as simply as if it were not air but electricity that had been made to flow across them. The first phone call I ever received from someone other than a friend or relative came when I was thirteen. My mom passed me the telephone with a smile, telling me that a vice president from Boeing had asked to speak with me. He had received my letter requesting a videotape of a 747 in flight, to show as part of a science project about that airplane. He was happy to help; he wished only to know whether I wanted my 747 to fly in VHS or Betamax format.
I am the only pilot in my family. But all the same, I feel that imaginatively, at least, airplanes and flying were never far from home. My father was completely enthralled by airplanes—the result of his front-row seat on the portion of the Second World War that took place in the skies above his childhood home in West Flanders. He learned the shapes of the aircraft and the sounds of their engines. “The thousands of planes in the sky were too much competition for my schoolbooks,” he later wrote. In the 1950s, he left Belgium to work as a missionary in the Belgian Congo, where he first flew in a small airplane. Then he sailed to Brazil, where in the 1960s he was one of surely not very many priests with a subscription to
Aviation Week
magazine. Finally he flew to America, where he met my mother, went to business school, and worked as a manager in mental health services. Airplanes fill his old notes and slides.