Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (14 page)

A parked airplane also embodies contrarieties of place. At the airport gate a plane is immobilized, Gulliver-like amid the vehicles, personnel, and activities that surround it. Yet it retains something of the imaginative shadow it cast when it vaulted seamlessly from Singapore to London—on the Andaman Sea, Delhi, Kashmir, the snowy peaks of Afghanistan, the holy city of Qom, the Black Sea, Transylvania, Vienna, the banks of the Rhine, the cathedral of Antwerp, the lanes of the Channel. The stillness of a parked airplane holds all places; such groundedness suggests only its opposite. That, I think, is what I realized when as a kid I saw that plane from Saudi Arabia parking at Kennedy Airport, and what I came across again, in a limited but more close-up way, when I walked around a small plane before my earliest flying lesson.

That first personal experience of inspecting an airplane I would help fly, as a wide-eyed teenager following an instructor around that small plane, has proved to be a constant in my flying career. Even for the largest airliners the tradition remains that before each flight one of the pilots will descend to the tarmac to inspect the aircraft exterior. This is colloquially called the
walk-around.

The walk-around reminds me that the built world is composed of a hierarchy of machine-based, increasingly superhuman-scaled spaces. We know this, but we so rarely have a chance to consider this hierarchy directly from our appointed places within it. The walk-around is an opportunity to cross these boundaries. The pilot leaves the more or less friendly public part of the airport, with its windows and music and chairs and cafés, and transits both vertically and conceptually down to the working area of the field. The actual descent often takes place on metal stairs attached to the side of a jetway. The angle of the staircase may change as the jetway rises or falls, and so they are often at their most precipitous when reaching up to the high doors of a 747. These narrow and vertiginous steps—even when it’s not dark, wet, and windy out—are the only ones in the whole world on which I’m religiously careful to use both handrails.

Rising noise marks the descent as steeply as the steps do. Sound floods over us the moment we open the heavy door to the stairs. Outside it’s a thunderous world, even when we’re wearing the required earplugs. People have no purpose or pleasure here, except to perform a specific task on an expensive and noisy machine, usually with the help of another expensive and noisy machine. From the stairs we move over the ground as we would cross the chaotic streets on our first day in a foreign city, relying on extreme caution, not the rules of traffic or the goodwill of drivers, to ensure our safety.

The area around each gate is carefully marked, in paint as well as in the mental maps of all who work here. Inside this area, certain vehicles and people move relatively freely. The border of this area, then, marks another transition, to the taxiways. The taxiways are nearly a no-man’s-land, a world scaled not only for enormous machines but for those on the move. A pilot will often walk near the border between the gate area and the taxiway. If you have ever stood next to a wide, racing highway, you will know the same vague malaise of unbelonging—the feeling that you are only narrowly separated from a realm of bigger, faster, harder creatures, the opposite feeling of walking down a small European street. The teams that push back the plane are among the few who walk on the taxiways, and there are elaborate rules to protect them from moving airplanes.

The taxiway—windswept, hard, vast—is alien in another sense. Here, it’s not tumbleweed that suddenly rolls past but a 230-foot-long, 400-ton aircraft, engines roaring. The passengers on planes taxiing out for takeoff have already left the humanly scaled world of the airport; indeed they have left the city, they have departed in all but the most physical sense. Faces you can hardly see in the blur of ovals provide the same flickering sense of others’ lives as you get through the window of a subway train that briefly parallels your own; the sight of someone already gone, the presence of absence.

Back inside the gate area are many machines that do not fly. It becomes clear on a walk-around why toy airplane sets so often include many of the ground vehicles, the enormously varied ecosystem that swirls over each aircraft like a reef. These vehicles and the staff they carry are busy here and now because the airliner will soon be inaccessible; they are doing what cannot be done later in the sky, which is to say everything. The term for an aircraft with a technical problem that prevents it from flying is
AOG,
for
Aircraft On Ground;
a term that precisely reflects the importance of minimizing the time between landing and takeoff.

There are the trains of baggage containers, and the vehicles that load these into the plane; there is the tug or tractor—the necessarily heavy vehicle that pushes the plane away from the terminal. It is typically locked onto the nose wheel several minutes before departure, a steaming cup of coffee waiting for the driver. Most airliners, unlike almost every other kind of vehicle, cannot move backward on their own. This small but necessary reversal, the need to push a plane backward a few hundred feet before releasing it to move forward 6,000 miles, still strikes me as curious, as if the motions of airliners over the planet were as simple as that of toy planes that must first be pulled back along the floor.

There are the catering vans, lifting high on their scissor-legged platforms, ready to deliver the meals you will eat hours and miles from here over some far country of cloud; there is the refueler, pumping 25,000 gallons or more of jet fuel into the wings, most of which will have been consumed by the engines before your pre-landing breakfast is served. Engineers may have parked their airport-confined cars nearby while they conduct their checks or repairs; other vehicles carry teams of cleaners, bags of blankets recently arrived or about to depart. One vehicle delivers water to the plane; another, sometimes referred to as the
honey wagon,
removes waste; one more may be rising skyward to scrub the cockpit windows or to wash ice from the wings.

The exact route of the walk-around is rigorously mapped in manuals. I begin near the nose, which is so high that I must move far ahead of the plane to see it. To view the plane head-on is to experience the aircraft as the air itself could be said to. From the front, an airliner looks like an animal—the cockpit windows like eyes, the cone like a nose or beak. A plane looks like a bird if you account for the wings, like an orca if you do not. The zoological imagery is reflected in both versions of the terminology used to direct planes as they push back from the gate—American controllers sometimes say: “Push, tail south,” while in much of the rest of the world the same instruction would be: “Push, face north.” Around the nose are probes that poke out and bend forward into the slipstream. They sense pressures, help calculate airspeed and altitude; their jaunty angles, their determined embrace of the slipstream, suggest nothing so much as a dog with its head out of a car window.

The cockpit windows embody both technical rectitude and the more human aspects of aviation. Drone aircraft, as the poet James Arthur reminds us, typically have no need for windows, a disconcerting facelessness that perhaps more than their perceived autonomy explains why drones so often look like something out of a horror movie. On the ground at night, with the cockpit screens and the lights turned down very low so the pilots can see out clearly, the cockpit windows of a taxiing plane form blank panels, as dark as pupils. Before pushback, though, brighter lights may be on in the cockpit. Sometimes when I see the nose of a parked aircraft from a terminal, I marvel at its smoothed technical precision, and then I’m struck by the sudden sight of faces within it, the pilots in the windows, one turning or smiling to the other behind the thick glass. So I try to imagine this view of the pilots in flight, high over some distant land—the inaudible conversation, the cups of tea rising to lips behind aquarium-thick panes.

The very first item on the checklist to be followed in the event of damage to a cockpit window—to make sure that our seat belts are fastened—is one that seems hardly necessary to have put in writing. The windows are heated to prevent ice from forming and to soften them, in order to better absorb the impact of birds. Such multilayered panes are a reminder of the days of open cockpits, and the sophistication of the facades we now so routinely craft to halt everything—birds, snow, hundreds of miles an hour of wind—everything but light.

Though the convergence of the lines of the plane naturally draws the gaze of an observer toward the nose, it’s the wings that dominate the experience of the walk-around. The word
wings
still retains echoes of the divine, as if their simplicity and beauty might lead us to forget that we ourselves make them. We sculpt them and then we fuse them to a bus. There is only one pair of wings, of course, thanks to the French aviator Louis Blériot, credited with the creation of the first practical monoplane. Embedded in the wings, in the curve of the 747’s take on Blériot’s innovation, are powerful lamps known as landing lights. We might thank Blériot, who first made car headlights practical, for these as well.

Whenever I look at a wingtip I like to think of the engineers and the years devoted to this pointed conjunction of design and air, where the wing gives way to the medium that breathes it to life. Such an apex should be marked with light, and so it is. Navigation lights, red and green, are arranged on wingtips as on the sides of a ship. A section in a manual describes the many exterior lights on the aircraft; it is a page I think of whenever I see blinking lights on top of radio masts or wind turbines or skyscrapers, how we mark the bodies and the endpoints of our creations.

On some aircraft there’s a white light on the wingtip, visible from the passenger cabin; it catches the eye like a bright star that rises up on takeoff, to shine with us through the night.

Just before takeoff on your next flight, let your eye mark the wingtip’s position—perhaps with the help of such lights—on a windowpane. What happens next is actually easier to observe when you can see a window but are not sitting adjacent to it. The wing starts to work even at low speeds. As the plane accelerates, the wing begins to rise. It works its magic first on itself—and the tips, where the wing’s labor vanishes into the wind that has conjured it, lift the most. Long before you are airborne the wings are claiming weight—their weight, your weight—from the wheels and the earth beneath them. It’s right to say that wings “soar.” They soar and pull us up. On many planes a line drawn between the tips of the wings in flight would pass well above the fuselage, which hangs in the bow they form.

To walk under the wing is to square this upper moving marvel with its ordinary and static underside. The first surprise is the length. Passengers walk down the inside of the fuselage, but never from one wingtip to the other. The wingspan of a 747 is not far short of twice the distance covered by the first flight at Kitty Hawk. Such a structure, from underneath, is broad and wide enough to shade me, or to keep me dry if rain or snow are falling. Though sometimes, even on a hot day, there is fuel in the wing that has been deeply chilled during its previous flight—a
cold-soaked wing.
The wing may then shower melting frost on my cap or face. It has brought down the cold of somewhere high and far.

Planes moving on the ground often remind me of large seals dragging themselves over a beach, in contrast with how elegantly they glide through water; or Olympic divers, when they heave themselves from the pool and clamber up a ladder, the inevitable tedium or inelegance that bookends their moments of grace. Underneath the wing and fuselage is the landing gear—what the plane stands on, when it must stand on the earth.

Poets and engineers alike have remarked on the Wright brothers’ background in bicycles. At some airports, staff use bicycles to travel around the tarmac. Often I see one of these airport bikes parked, resting on its kickstand in the shadow of a 747, which with equal nonchalance is resting 350 tons on its eighteen wheels. Later, in the cockpit, I find myself thinking about my brother and I realize it is because I saw the bicycle, and I think of the latest bike he’s made for me; or I wish I had taken a picture of the one beneath the airplane, our two passions as proximate as they were for two brothers in 1903.

Consider what happens when engineers face any decision that affects the weight of an aircraft. Let’s say, for example, that designers would like to install more substantial, homelike basins in the bathrooms—basins that happen to weigh a little more than the usual ones. Such a seemingly minor increase in weight in one small area may echo throughout the entire aircraft’s design. The heavier basins may require slightly stronger (and heavier) structures for the surrounding walls. To carry and maneuver this extra weight may require stronger (and heavier) wings and engines that burn more fuel. Such a dramatic rippling of compromises and consequences throughout the airplane is sometimes described as a
gearing effect.
By one calculation, the addition of 1 pound to an aircraft’s basic design results in a 10-pound decrease in the payload the plane can carry across the world.

I like to think that one reason airplanes are so elegant is that, as with the exacting demands of aerodynamics, such a severe gearing effect acts as a kind of natural sculptor, a scalpel on the excesses that crowd on less weight-critical human creations, the excesses that we do not know to miss. The gearing effect also suggests the great importance of anything that is permitted to be heavy or obviously ungainly on an aircraft, such as the landing gear. The enormous metal stalks of the 747’s main gear legs, each as thick as a young oak, are an image of shameless brawn at the intersection between air and ground. The gear must bear much more than the weight of the plane; it must bear the impact of landing—in this sense it is an enormous shock absorber—and yet in the event of unusual stress it must break cleanly from the aircraft. It must hold the wheels and the heavy brakes, and allow them to cool. Yet even this heft swarms with sober intricacy, a wiry cloud of technical brilliances, hydraulic arteries, and the joints and appendages that allow the structures to raise themselves up at the flick of a cockpit switch so that a Swiss clockwork of complex paneling can close over them.