Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (35 page)

My first view of the auroras reminded me how much I wanted to become a pilot. Not long after my flight as a passenger under the northern lights I was accepted to an airline training course. I waited until I had passed my medical tests and then I told my colleagues in the consulting company. I don’t think anyone who had flown with me on a business trip was surprised. One said she now understood my great affection for aviation-tuned business jargon—“Let’s blue-sky this,” for example, or “We’ve got some strong headwinds in Q2,” or “Let’s take the 30,000-foot view here,” or “They’ve got a good long runway,” to describe an excess of the time and breathing room that an investment gives to a new company. (I’m surprised businesspeople haven’t adopted
Wilco,
a military and aviation term for
Will comply
that’s heard often on the aircraft’s radios. “Wilco—I heard your instruction and I will carry it out.”)

Another colleague hugged me and joked about how I had always loved to work in the small shared glass-walled room at the top of our building, the one where we were encouraged to go to do our blue-sky thinking; and about how, on even long night flights, I always seemed to have trouble sleeping.

As the years since I became a pilot go by, though, I find that the northern lights have come to represent a challenge I didn’t expect. There are fallacies and complacencies in a life in which auroras are routine and I lose count of the shooting stars on a single flight. Sometimes I find it hard to remain interested—in the northern lights, in the ceaseless numbers of meteors or a hundred other phenomena of the sky and earth—because they appear so regularly; because they are routine to pilots, ordinary by definition.

My original excitement returns, at least in part, when I try to share what I see with others. When I see the auroras start to form I often tell the flight attendants so that they can look from a window near them or come to the cockpit for a wider and clearer view. They almost always do; for many colleagues the northern lights remain the most revered sight in the sky, one that is especially gratifying in the quiet hours of our long and wakeful nights on an otherwise sleeping airplane.

What pilots decide to tell passengers about the view says much about the place of flight in the modern world. Even during daylight flights, there is a reluctance to interrupt rest or movies with an announcement—and, of course, on a wide-body airplane many passengers will not have clear views through a window. Auroras usually appear when passengers are trying to sleep, so we do not generally announce them. Not every passenger would thank us for waking them up. Sometimes, though, if a passenger is awake—a businessperson perhaps, working through the night on a laptop as I sometimes did—I or one of the cabin crew may quietly point to the window, to the surf of light breaking along the sky’s northern shores, and afterward the crew member and I may talk about the sight in the galley, as if it was almost new to us again.

—

I’ve been flying the 747 for only a few months. I’ve completed the simulator training and a series of training flights. For my final exam I have just flown to Dulles Airport outside Washington. When we return to Heathrow, the training captain shakes my hand. Welcome, he says, to the 747.

I am now on my first regular flight since my completion of training. I am going to Bahrain and then on to Qatar, two countries I have never been to before. The leg from London to Bahrain, though about twice as long as any flight I ever flew on the Airbus, is one of the shortest flights for the 747. As we pass to the southwest of Istanbul, I realize that these are new skies, a region of the world I’ve never flown to as a pilot before; and I remember that the last time I flew near here it was as a passenger, returning from Nairobi to London via the Middle East; I had recently left my graduate program, and wasn’t yet sure what was next for me.

We near the Lebanese coast, where I see mountains that I had known about from our charts but that I did not ever expect to find snowcapped. The captain tells me there is good skiing there. A new sky, a new world. Soon we are crossing Saudi Arabia. Before I became a pilot I did not grasp the horizontal dimensions of an airliner’s descent, that it can take well over 100 miles; that it is common to start descending toward one country while still high over another. Our vertical journey to Bahrain begins long before we see its lights, long before we can see the far coast of Saudi Arabia.

The return flight to London follows a more northerly route. We cross Kuwait, pass within sight of Iran, and then enter Iraqi airspace. We contact controllers whose accents are more American Midwestern than Middle Eastern. At one point I look down and see a pool of green-gray light beneath us, floating in the hazy darkness. The lights of cities and the outlines they form are often marvelously sharp at night; the etched-glass clarity suggests growth patterns that are simultaneously planned yet biological, an evolved, accidental perfection. But tonight a combination of humidity and rising heat occludes everything at a distance, and the lights below have a kind of fuzzed granularity, like television static or snow. It’s the opposite of the crystalline air and light of other desert cities, other nights.

A quick check of the charts reveals that this illumination has a name: it is Baghdad. With my colleague keeping an eye on the instruments, I dim the overhead cockpit lights and press my face to the window. This is what I will later report to friends about this trip, about my first ordinary, post-training flight—that I saw the lights of all Baghdad pass by in the night, and then I ate a sandwich.

Many travelers who ask for window seats are fans of what the earth shows of itself—its natural elements such as mountains, coastlines, rivers and the valleys that cradle them. Such views are a reward of flight, and perhaps the best reason to prize flying in daylight. But many geographic details are also visible at night, when their human significance may become clearer.

In the film
Chasing Ice
the photographer James Balog examines the effects of climate change on glaciers, a topic of interest, perhaps, to those who occasionally overfly the iciest parts of the world. Aside from the vivid images of our changing home, I was struck by his particular affection for photography after dark. There’s something about observing the world at night, he says, “that places your mind on the surface of a planet…out in the middle of a galaxy.” Though airliners take us as far from the planet’s surface as most of us are likely to get, when I heard this I thought: Yes, this is something close to why I like flying at night. Night flights remind us that we live our lives on the surface of a revolving sphere, a truth that many of us may see most clearly in the hours we excuse ourselves from it.

Some geographic features on a dark land can be seen directly, when waterborne moonlight falls on a land streaked with rivers or dotted with lakes, for example, or when starlight falls on snowcapped peaks. Others can be seen indirectly, through their effect on the lights of mankind. “You can’t divorce civilization from nature,” continues Balog, who has seen more clearly than most the effect of one upon the other. And the outlines of this relationship are exactly what we see from the sky, after darkness falls, when a populated river valley such as the Nile is often far more distinct than in the day. After sunset the banks of the Nile turn to paired rivers of light, and even under a thin layer of cloud the illuminated edges of the river are diffused but visible and form auriferous, leopard-like patterns in the cloudscape. Civilization casts outlines of both itself and physical geography up into the night, and through the night’s clouds we may see rising up what we are blind to in daylight: the cities of Egypt and the lines of its river.

Mountains, meanwhile, can be discerned by the absence of human light, which may flow around an isolated peak as naturally as water divides around a rock in a stream. When the mountains start at a coast, as they do along much of the northern and eastern Mediterranean, the illuminations of villages and roads are compressed into a golden, littoral plait that lies between the line of unseen water and the shadow of sharply rising land. If the lights of coasts like this one were not so severe in their detail and precision we might call such a view impressionistic and recall Cézanne’s description of Monet—“only an eye, but my God, what an eye.”

Even during the day, when we survey the works of humanity on the earth, the blessing is both how much we can see and how little. The smaller details are summed or lost. Cars become streams, which become abstracted arteries of motion. Less becomes more: houses turn into communities, communities into a city, a vast city refracts into its bones of light, into the only understanding of it. From the plane we see human landscapes the way a neurologist might sketch an outline of the nervous system: drawings of intricacy, networks, pathways, pulses, and flows that know only their part, not the whole they form.

This distillation—that of millions of individual lives and moments into the physical infrastructure that houses them—is greatly heightened at night. Indeed, so often from a plane at night, the truths of human geography are the only things we see, and all of them in light.

What is so important that we choose to light it? Flight raises few questions as often as this one. A fifth of the world’s electricity is used for lighting. Each light we see during our long nights awake above the earth is placed there, maintained with intention. The world still has its lamplighters, though we do not call them this any longer, and we think of them less than we did in the smoky cities of the past. The next time you fly over the glowing dendrites of a populated section of our world, try to imagine the plug pulled, the landscape gone dark, with only moonlight reflecting on water or the occasional fire; dark as the earth was until so recently in the history of our species. When we look down from an airplane we see our civilization engraved in light; we confront the new and stately shock of our bioluminescence.

Some cities are so enormous that from your general position above the world their light-identities are unmistakable: here is Chicago or Karachi or Algiers. But smaller cities may mean more, when you realize that one you used to live in is floating in the darkness beneath you, like a ship you once traveled on; or when you sleep through a long flight and awaken, just before landing, to raise the shade on the gathering lights of home.

Other cities pass by namelessly. I remember, as a child, the feeling of being in the backseat of a car late on the night of Christmas Day, heading home, passing through communities that were not mine, or walking through deserted streets late on Christmas Eve, perhaps to enjoy new snow. At such moments there was a peculiar quality to the quiet houses. Even the Christmas decorations hung on such stillness couldn’t capture the weight of the holiday that when you are a child permeates everything. Instead I placed that weight onto the empty streets and the silence and the outlines of nearly dark houses. At night, many cities pass like this on the land. What little we see of the lives within them becomes its own kind of weight.

This sense of the night landscape as a shorthand for the human world is echoed in the cockpit. While cities, countries, and continents are entirely absent from the 747’s navigation display, only airports are marked clearly, with a blue circle. We see the light of cities on the earth below; while the world the 747 knows is composed only of blue circles drawn against the darkness of the screen. Over much of the world, however, the shape of land can still be discerned indirectly from the patterns airports make on these screens. Britain, cast in the blue rings of its airports, is easily recognizable, as is all of Western Europe. The eastern United States, too, is drawn well enough from the airport rings that form something like the shape of a continent. Lights on the ground below show an observer in a window seat where people live, and where factories make things; blue circles on a pilot’s screen show where enough people live, or enough things are made, to warrant an airport big enough to be programmed into a 747.

I often fly over the Democratic Republic of Congo, where my father lived so long ago when it was a Belgian colony. David Van Reybrouck, a Flemish writer, recently completed an enthralling history of the country, which I am sorry my father did not live to read. The author opens his tale with descriptions of approaches to the country by sea and also by air, an arrival that requires no blue circles in the mind. (The book closes, too, with a flight over Congo, “the huge, moss-green broccoli of the equatorial forest, crisscrossed on occasion by a brown river glistening in the sun.”)

Congo today has around 80 million inhabitants—more than Britain or France, about twice the number of California. Its area is six times larger than Japan, something like Alaska and Texas combined. And yet Congo has only two blue circles on our screens, neither of which appear on a more restrictive list of airports where we would consider landing a 747 under normal circumstances. Africa, the second-most populous continent, accounts for less than 3 percent of the world’s air-passenger traffic. An observer of modern Africa might watch for changes in the lights seen from above or for additions to the constellations of rings on the navigation screens of overflying airliners.

Congo’s most useful blue ring stands for the airport of Kinshasa, a city I now and then overfly between London and Cape Town. There is often little time to look out at Kinshasa though, which my father knew as Leopoldville, because the view coincides with a busy section of flying where the aerial regions of several countries meet. There are often storms here, too, and even when the night is cloudless the humid, equatorial air is rarely clear. The city and the country are among the few that now remain to which my father traveled, but I have not.

When I have had the chance to look out of the window on a clear night, there has been little to see. The lights of Kinshasa are shockingly few for a city of this size, and the contrast between its scattered lights and the dizzying grids of much smaller places in the rest of the world is jarring. Every night that I fly over the United States I pass small cities I know nothing of, that I’ve barely heard of, that appear brighter than Kinshasa. Even the light we do see of Kinshasa looks slightly green and wavy, as if it has emerged from a boundless volume of water that has absorbed or scattered the energy of the metropolis. The world remains unequal, in light as in almost everything else, and the lesson of Kinshasa lies open to the sky, in the dimmed night-whorl of its fingerprint.