Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (26 page)

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Snow and airplanes may not be the best of friends, but they work together much more smoothly than snow and airports. The most formidable snow-induced challenges in aviation, in my experience, take place not in flight but on the ground, on taxiways after landing or before takeoff. Several times I’ve made a routine landing in moderate snowfall, but on the way to the terminal we’ve been forced to a complete stop for half an hour or more, prevented from proceeding because the taxiways are too icy or because we are unable to distinguish the tarmac from the grass, in the same way that from high over the Arctic we often cannot tell where frozen land ends and frozen sea begins. Airports are open, windswept places; it is difficult to keep runways and taxiways clear, especially in the strong winds that often rise as the snow stops falling.

The storm-tossed vessel in Coleridge’s
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
is driven toward Antarctica, the “land of mist and snow,” where “ice, mast-high, came floating by.” Such imagery, of ice in the sea or ice forming on a vessel itself, conjures an extreme sense of wayfaring; we have traveled so far across water that the water itself is changing form. A pilot may think of Coleridge’s title when learning about “rime,” one of the many forms of ice that pilots will study. There is also
hoar frost, active frost
and the dreaded
clear ice;
there’s
freezing drizzle, ice pellets,
and
freezing fog.
The definitions are both precise and ordinary. Snow
pellets
typically bounce and sometimes shatter. Snow
grains
do not. The definitions evoke playground training:
wet
snow forms a snowball,
dry
snow will fall apart if you try.

My visual flight training near Phoenix ran from late autumn through early winter. To make the most of the daylight we would start our preflight preparations before dawn. Often, even in that famously warm city, thick frost would build up on the wings during the cold desert nights. When the sun finally rose and hit one wing, the frost on it would melt in seconds, hardly less quickly than a hairdryer clears a misted mirror. Then we would untie the plane and push it, turn it around, so that the new day would fall on the other wing, and cleanse it, too, of ice. And then we would be ready to fly.

Occasionally we encounter ice in flight. On the Airbus I flew earlier in my career it was easy to see when ice had begun to form on the wings. But there was also a tiny pole—what we might call an ice catcher—perched outside the front windows of the cockpit, which served us like a canary in a mine. If we saw ice form on this pole then we could assume it had formed elsewhere on the aircraft. The probe contained a dim light so that we could examine it at night, but I found it easier to shine my flashlight forward through the window into the freezing slipstream, to see whether ice had gathered on the finger the plane held forth into the night for only this purpose. In the blackness, where despite our speed there was often no visual sense of motion, the plane felt like a deep-sea probe, with me peering out into the night from behind the thick panes, shining a light entirely out of scale with the enormous watery volume it barely penetrated.

The equipment to remove or prevent icing on wings surprised me when I learned to fly. It says something appealing about wings, and about speed and air, that this equipment is installed only around the front of the wings, their leading edges. In general terms
supercooled water entrained in airflow
does not accumulate on the tops of the wings during flight; it does not even touch the tops, as if in deference to how perfectly the wings part the air. Only after landing, when the plane slows and the wings are no longer wings, will they begin to whiten beneath the falling snow.

Engines also have de-icing systems. Unless the air is unusually warm or cold it’s assumed that any cloud—any
visible moisture,
a formal term that includes rain, fog, and snow as well as clouds—can cause icing. On the 747 this system typically works in an automatic mode in flight, but on the Airbus we activated it manually. We would turn the system on nearly every time we flew into a cloud, and off again when we flew out of it. The pressing of the buttons became as ordinary a ritual as turning on a car’s windshield wipers when it starts to rain—an action to perform when the world turns white, and again when the world turns blue.

In weather forecasts in the American West you sometimes hear the term
snow line
or
snow level,
followed by an altitude; this is the horizontal division of the sky where snow turns to rain, a term and concept that makes particular sense from above. The snow level appears on the mountains, like the waterline against the depth marks of the side of a ship—a calendar, a slide rule that descends in winter and rises in spring. Often I land in a city in snow and walk through it that night, or the next bright morning, a city transformed, and it occurs to me that the snow and I descended together. At other times we fly through snow but land in rain in a place without mountains, crossing the snow level that weather forecasters would enumerate, if only there were hillsides here to reflect it. For those who like snow as much as me, it’s a pleasure to imagine, when seeking shelter from a cold winter rain, that not too far above me a blizzard may be raging.

At night, mountains without snow are shadows on shadows. But snowcapped mountains glow even in starlight and in moonlight they come alive as vividly as cumulus clouds do—ghostly cones, divine blankets cast silently over unseen forms. There are mountainous lands such as Afghanistan and Pakistan that I have seen almost exclusively at night, their snowcapped highlands striped with zebra-like dark valleys where snow has not fallen or has already melted. Even flatlands show a pleasingly different face when covered in snow. When I think of Minnesota, for example, I think first of flying over it at night in winter: steady glowing cities luminous on the snow, under the moon and stars, a land and season that are never truly dark.

Heavy snow, especially at night, greatly impedes our ability to see ahead, so much so that, as in fog, controllers may issue visibility reports from the transmissometers on the runway, and automatic landings may be required. In the first part of the descent the airplane’s strobe lights illuminate the composition of the storm, the way a flashbulb spotlights faces in a dark and crowded room. Each flash locks the snowflakes, lifted in the wind and racing past the plane at hundreds of miles an hour, into a seemingly impossible still image, a frozen moment in the inner life of a blizzard.

Later in the descent the steady, forward-facing landing lights may be turned on and so the flashing, time-freezing effect of the strobe lights is diminished. Unlike rain, which appears from nowhere on the surface of the windows, if we see it at all, snowflakes in these beams appear as actual objects, as a new storm of spotlit ghostly flakes that fly continuously toward and over us. And so it is snow that gives us the rarest glimpse of the aircraft’s true speed. Snowstorms, after all, are the only time visible objects are so close to us in flight. The racetrack pace of the streaming snow is like nothing so much as the graphics used to indicate fast travel in science-fiction movies—stars that motion turns to perfect white lines across the darkness.

Sometimes above Canada we see temporary ice roads, drawn over frozen bodies of water for vehicles and their brave drivers to cross. The ice roads often form straight lines, and the eye, surveying an hours-long chaos of wilderness, is instantly drawn to the unnatural sight of anything straight. They often mirror the contrails a jet draws above them in the sky, which like ice roads are straight and identifiably man-made, at least until the wind starts to work on them.

Once, in Helsinki in midwinter, a captain and I walked down to the quiet waterfront in a blisteringly cold wind, because a waiter had told us that even on such a frozen night the ferries were still running, and neither of us had ever been on an icebreaker. In the nearly subarctic darkness we boarded the ferry bound for Suomenlinna, the great island fortress in the city’s ice-caked harbor. The vessel was as quiet as the city. We told the captain we were pilots and without a smile or a word he motioned us to ride with him in the wheelhouse, from where we watched the nearly empty ferry bump through the jet-black water, casually knocking car-sized chunks of ice that tumbled off to the left or right of our course. Visually, the effect was similar to a flight among cumulus clouds, but one jarred by the distinctly un-vaporous thumps of solid ice that the bow cast aside. It was easier, the ferry captain said, to follow the trail he had forced earlier than to make a new one. The marbled path through the solid white was the inversion of an ice road; it was a trail broken in water.

Later that winter on a clear day I passed to the south of Helsinki, over the Gulf of Finland, en route to St. Petersburg. I saw from high above the ferry-cut paths similar to those we had seen in Helsinki’s harbor, but on a much larger scale. The ice-crumbled highways running in lazy arcs through the frozen sheet of the gulf were left by large Baltic ferries. The lines formed a life-sized chart of the ferry routes; they had exactly the shape and perfect sweep that you might see on maps of early undersea telegraph-cable routes or of the idealized paths between cities that appear in the back pages of an airliner’s on-board magazine.

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The over-the-top truth of great circles means that planes routing between otherwise balmy cities—Tokyo and Atlanta, Dubai and Los Angeles, flights on which no one has brought winter gloves—typically cross over the far north. The congenital chilliness of great circles is apparent in the southern hemisphere, too, though far fewer airliners ply them. Once in Buenos Aires, between flights from and to São Paulo, I saw another 747, bound for Australia. The captain and I, both far more accustomed to the geographies and routings around the opposite, north side of the planet, made a bet about whether the so-called straight line between Buenos Aires and Sydney, such famously sultry metropolises, reaches Antarctica. It nearly does.

As autumn turns to winter an enormous portion of North America and North Asia, where many long-haul pilots spend much of their workday, falls into whiteness. For pilots as well as for passengers, these hours over this cold realm—on an entirely routine flight between the worlds known as Los Angeles and Paris, for example—are an opportunity few of us will otherwise have to meditate on temperatures and places we will never stand in. The room-temperature cabin of the plane arcs over lands and seas masked entirely by the white that Melville described in
Moby-Dick
—of the whale but also of polar bears, and ghosts, and horses of legend, and the “vast archangel wings” of the albatross—a whiteness that was “the monumental white shroud” of Arctic lands, or the “phantom of the whitened waters” that brings forth “a peculiar apparition to the soul.” A whiteness, in other words, as with that of clouds, that is reason enough to reach for my sunglasses.

My father once remarked that growing up in Belgium, it was possible to discern whether someone was from only a village or two away by their accent. When I fly over a populated, temperate part of the world, it is easy to look down at the kinds of vegetation, and the terrain, and to imagine that—at least before modern nation-states and their education systems—languages once flowed gradually from place to place, changing as naturally as ecosystems, words leading on to words. In aviation we speak of
isobars,
lines of constant air pressure on a map;
isotachs,
lines of constant wind speed; and
isogons,
a general term that we most often use for lines of constant magnetic variation. An
isogloss
is the geographic boundary of a characteristic of language—the borderline of the natural range of a word, an accent, a feature of syntax.

Flying over the populated realms of Europe or Asia, I may look down and ask what the language is here; how words and sounds change as this land rolls into another. Sometimes the question is answered. We hear the accents of controllers change as we switch from London controllers to their Scottish or Irish colleagues; as we cross between Quebec and the rest of Canada; when we cross the U.S.-Canadian border, and then when we move across the United States, especially from north to south. But over the remote parts of the far north—places uninhabited, or inhabited so lightly that such inhabitation is as invisible on the land as in the modern imagination—this visually inspired question about the sound of a place does not arise, and the controllers we speak to from over such places may themselves be very far away.

Occasionally there are names to hear, the beacons of small places or geographic features that we can scarcely discern in the white. Once, over Siberia, I saw a river, its motion frozen whole upon the land. At home I looked it up; it was the Lena, from which Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov is said to have taken the alias Lenin, as if Lincoln or Churchill had adopted some version of Mississippi or Thames. Spring leaves unexpected marks on Siberia. The southern portions of the rivers melt first, but many of them flow north, toward the ice dams, where the river has not yet thawed. Spring piles up; the liquid season floods the land.

Climate scientists, who have the best reasons to look down at the realms of cold water, may rely not on satellite photographs but on more specialized, satellite-imaging tools to fully distinguish clouds in the sky from ice in the sea. From airliners, the challenge they face is obvious. Often the sea off the Labrador coast of Canada will be filled with chunks of ice so numerous, and so small from the height of an airliner, so hauntingly gathered and conducted by what looks as if it must be an aerial force, that their pixels run together to form yet another kind of cloud. Only when you look closely might you see that the bleached curves and contours of these surface nebulae are composed not of clouds but of tiny imperfect discs of ice, swept along as if they were nothing larger than flecks of dried house paint scratched from your hands into the kitchen sink.