Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (5 page)

If the enclosed airspace of the world—“breathing what is called air,” in poet W. S. Merwin’s description of waiting in an airport’s atmosphere—is a sad thing, an effacement of place or a modern excess of insulation and comfort, it has the advantage that it makes arrival in the true air of a city much more vivid. If I sailed from one city to another slowly, exposed to long weeks of the elements, I might not notice how sharp the air differences are between the two places.

Flying into certain Indian cities, I have come to recognize and love the unique and rich, faintly smoky smell that I have been told comes from the burning of biomass and fuel derived from cattle waste. It must rise through, or pool at, certain altitudes. Often I can smell it in the cockpit at night, in the last minutes before we land. Particularly if you are from one of these cities and have been away for a long time, this must be a pleasing thing to recognize, an unmistakable and physical quality of the air that returns in rough symmetry with the lights of home.

I did not grow up in Boston, but it has been an important city in my life. When my father left Brazil this is where he came, and where he met my mother. I lived in the city for several years when I worked in the business world. After I moved to Boston, my mom pointed out that, unknowingly, I had picked an apartment a few blocks from where she had chosen to live three decades earlier, which was itself only a few blocks from where my father had lived in the Back Bay. When I fly to Boston now I can often smell the sea as soon as I step out of the airport. Sometimes I smell the city even before I step off the plane, especially in winter, when the snow-air mixes with the salt and there can be no question where I am. The smell of Boston is not quite the smell of home, but after 3,000 miles of flight to the city where my parents met, it will do.

The smells of cities are so distinct that it’s disconcerting when they occasionally fail to match our memories. Once I landed in New York, in the throes of a summer wave of heat and humidity, the day after a trip from Eastern Asia. I took a cab from the airport, and when I opened the window I felt a gust of the night air, the thick water-air of a sweltering city that would barely cool in the evening. If I’d been blindfolded and had had to guess where I was, I would have said Singapore or Bangkok; somewhere near a warm sea, with a neon-scattering waterfront and outdoor markets thronged with evening diners; a place on which snow might never fall.

More intrepid travelers will also know the experience of flying from a shining steel, glass, and marble airport to the sky-harbor of somewhere smaller or poorer, where there are no jetways, and maybe only a handful of flights per day, and where as the plane parks on the tarmac staff rush toward it. As soon as the door opens you feel a rush of wind bearing new smells, and you know instantly it’s a different place; it’s special not just because the air is different from yours but because there is no built air, and you walk down the steps—a reminder that we arrive not in a place, but onto it.

If there is a charm to this manner of ending a journey and leaving an aircraft, it’s because for many of us it is unusual, and it generally occurs in hot places. Few of us want anything like this experience if we fly home to darkness and sleet. Still, such warm moments are a chance to disassemble the word
touchdown,
to recall old films of arriving royalty or the Beatles disembarking the aircraft named
Jet Clipper Defiance
on even a cold February day; the cover of cloud or the blaze of sunshine as feet reach new ground; a weight of arrival that rests as much on the air as on the earth.

—

I’ve just landed in Tripoli. We’re not staying overnight here; such a trip, in an overlapping of the terminology of airline crews and Tolkien, is known as a
there-and-back.
We’ve parked the plane, the passengers have disembarked, the cleaners have boarded. We arrived early—helped by a tailwind—and so we have some free time before we must begin the preparations for our return.

I wander into the terminal. It’s true that airports are increasingly homogeneous, globalized places, but anyone who thinks that this process is complete might compare Tripoli’s airport to, say, Pittsburgh’s. I walk past the Libyan families and the Western oil workers, looking forward, perhaps, to their first beer in months after takeoff. I head to the roughly decorated cafeteria, to buy a snack I’ve come to like here: a tasty creation something like a spinach turnover. I browse in the small shop that stocks shelves of books written by Muammar Gaddafi and a handful of postcards of glamorous old Tripoli, the palm trees on the avenues faded and the address side discolored and a little damp.

Eventually I return to the aircraft and walk to the back of the plane, to where rough metal stairs—
air stairs,
naturally—are positioned by an open door. I sit on them in the shadow of the tail, watching the occasional jet land, from airlines and cities whose names are unfamiliar to me. It’s hot, and since passengers can’t see me from the terminal, I take off my tie. I eat my Libyan turnover and then a sandwich I made in London this morning.

Airport tarmacs have their own smells, of course, but here is also a telltale hazy breeze, one that mixes the heat and the nearby ocean with the golden dust that accumulates on everything and that I will have to brush from my trousers when I stand up. Soon enough it’s time to leave Libya, to fly back up into the common air, to cross the Mediterranean, and Corsica and the Alps and Paris, and then to descend to England’s sky.

We bank over Tower Bridge. Not very long afterward I walk under the sky where I have flown, under the lights, timed like clockwork, of the next hour’s planes, to meet friends at a restaurant on the South Bank. They ask me how my day has been. Good, I say. It was good. Anywhere interesting? they ask, though they mean it half as a joke; nowhere I might answer would surprise them anymore. During the meal my attention drifts occasionally. How could it be, I ask myself, that I have gone to Africa today and returned? I blink and look around at my friends and the crowded restaurant, at the twinkling glasses and the dark woodwork. And I remember, as if from a dream, the blue sea of air over the Mediterranean, the blaze of an ordinary afternoon in Tripoli, and my lunch on the air stairs, in the shadow the plane brought to Libya and then took away.

—

Geography is a means of dividing the world—of drawing the lines of political entities or per-capita income or precipitation that best illuminate the surface of our spherical home and the often jarringly physical characteristics of our civilization on it. Aviation both writes its own geographies and reflects older ones, as does every air worker and traveler.

There are places I have flown to, and places I have not. This is a way of thinking about the planet that I had not anticipated before I became a pilot; it is one that arguably matters more, not less, the more you travel. On a long-haul pilot’s own map of the world some cities glow with frequent and recent experience, others less so, and some are entirely dark. As a relatively junior pilot, I have a map sparser than those of most of my colleagues. It still happens once or twice a year that I fly to an airport I have never flown to before, because the route is new, or the airport itself is new, or the route has switched to the 747 from another aircraft. For days in advance of such a flight I will look at the charts for the airport and for others nearby, or at the flight documents prepared for a previous day’s flight. It is common, when we meet our colleagues for a flight, for the captain to ask: Have you been there recently? Or: Have you been there before? We are sharing our maps.

Aside from my personal borders between the places I have and have not been to, the most fundamental division of the world may not be an obvious one, such as whether you are over land or water, in cloud or in the clear, whether it is dark or light. Perhaps the simplest bifurcation of the heavens is between the regions of the world that are covered by radar and those that are not. On the ground at certain airports, markings on our charts exactingly delineate those aprons or taxiways that cannot be directly seen by the controllers in the tower. The whole world is divided in a similar way, by the presence or absence of radar coverage. A surprisingly large portion of the world has no civilian radar. There is none over the seas once you leave coastlines far behind. There is none over Greenland, large parts of Africa, or significant portions of Canada and Australia. Where I fly within a certain distance of a radar site or installation—
radar head
is the term sometimes used for the rotating part—the air-traffic controllers can “watch” my plane in a direct sense. Where there is no radar, they cannot, and we must report our positions via various increasingly sophisticated electronic means or by reading out to them on the radio our time and altitude for various locations, a
position report
that they must then read carefully back, to check that they have heard us correctly.

This sense of being watched, or not, divides the world. To be outside radar range is not like being in a place without cell phone coverage, because we are still in communication with the controllers. It’s not like entering a tunnel in a car and losing your GPS location, because pilots know where they are. Nor is the difference comparable to situations in which you are made uncomfortable by being observed, because pilots prefer controllers to be watching them; there is relief when controllers tell us we are
radar identified,
and the sense that we are crossing into a less isolated portion of the journey, or nearing its end.

Mountains above a certain height constitute another division of the world, a separate realm of sky. The altitude above which we are required to wear oxygen masks if the cabin pressure fails is 10,000 feet, and so this rough contour shaped by peaks and an added safety margin forms perhaps the map of the world that a pilot might draw most easily from memory, as if sea level had risen by about 2 miles. The world that remains exists largely in two great, distinct bands. An enormously long swathe of Eurasia, from Spain across to the Alps and the Balkans, from Turkey roughly eastward to China and Japan, crossing the highlands of such countries as Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Mongolia, forms the heart of the map. Another long line of minimum altitudes marked on our charts in red runs in an all but unbroken line along the western side of the Americas, from Alaska down through the Andes; from the Arctic to the Southern Ocean.

On this map of world-height, the United States east of the Mississippi does not exist. Huge portions of Africa, Brazil, Russia, and Canada are absent, too, as is the entire continent of Australia. A similar but inverted sort of blankness covers the peaks of the Himalayas. In 1933, only three decades after the first flight at Kitty Hawk, the peak of Everest was overflown by an airplane, though one of the onboard photographers passed out from a lack of oxygen. Today there are few routes over much of the Himalayas—not because airliners cannot easily overfly even Everest, but because the terrain beneath limits their ability to descend in the event of technical problems. For this reason many pilots consider the planet’s highest mountains least often of all.

The air of the world is divided in other ways. We cannot fly just anywhere. Large regions of airspace are restricted, often for military use, while many smaller chunks are blocked off because they lie over noise-sensitive areas—the center of a city or the palace of a sultan. These restricted airspace blocks are usually marked on our charts by combinations of letters and numbers, not names. But near Mumbai is one known as the Tower of Silence. In the city is a structure on which members of the Parsi community can ritually leave the bodies of the deceased to be consumed by vultures, a process that is elsewhere called a
sky burial.
The area and its name are marked in red on our charts. Some areas where no jets will fly have a ceiling and stop at a certain height, but the Tower of Silence goes all the way up.

There are, of course, great socioeconomic divisions in the world that airliners cross almost as if they do not exist. Even poor countries generally have internationally standardized air-traffic rules and control services. We can envisage in the sky a kind of continuous space, an insulated sphere above and around the earth, in which these standards prevail, regardless of the conditions on the ground below. A plane flies through this well-regulated realm, over cities and countries where we would not wish to land if we had an ill passenger onboard, places that in terms of certain medical services might as well be the ocean; and then we descend from this upper world through similarly regulated corridors down to our destination itself, where a long list of standards—from the suitability of the available water to various safety-related aviation functions—have been assessed. An airliner bound for certain cities will leave London with water onboard for both the outbound and return journeys—sometimes carrying even round-trip fuel and food as well.

In Cape Town, if the wind is from the north, you land from the south, flying, in the last minutes of the flight, near Khayelitsha, a Xhosa name that is almost as beautiful in English—New Home—and Mitchell’s Plain, townships that each house hundreds of thousands of people. When I have flown there as a passenger, and had the time to look, I have been struck visually by the power of birth and circumstance: the picture of inequity made by the shining wings from somewhere far away crossing over these settlements, and the freedom international travelers have to descend over the morning of half a million people, some of whom will have already flown, or will one day fly, but many of whom probably never will.

It occurs to me, when I am flying over Hokkaido or rural Austria or Oklahoma City, to ask who might look up and see the contrails of the plane light up at dawn. I feel this equally when I am on the ground looking up at a plane, on the other side of this greeting, as if I’m still a kid marveling at what it must be like to be way up there or remembering my first flight. But there are many places where such reciprocity cannot yet be reflected, the places the plane moves freely over, where place is as heavy as lead.