Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (16 page)

When we enter the simulator the motion is deactivated. Before the instructor activates it, we must fasten our seat belts, as we must on the real aircraft before it moves. In smooth conditions in the cruise the seat belt is worn as a heavy-duty but otherwise ordinary version of what passengers wear across their laps; for takeoff and landing, however, we are attached to the seat by five straps that meet at a starlike buckle in front of us. The instructor demonstrates the oxygen masks—the web of straps that expand and then close over your entire head, like some life-giving squid bred expressly for this purpose. On the 747—but not its simulator—there is also an overhead hatch. There are handles,
inertial reels,
that under your weight will extend slowly on a cable to lower you all the way down to the tarmac, as if from the roof of a three-story building.

In certain training exercises in the simulator that relate to the presence of smoke or fumes in the cockpit, we are taught to pull an overhead handle that vents the cockpit air directly to the outside atmosphere. Cigarette smoke, of course, was once a regular presence in the cockpit. As I settle into my seat I am surprised to see ashtrays in the frames of the huge side windows of even the simulator, unused now. I smoked for several years in my late teens and early twenties. Cigarettes weren’t a pleasant thing on airplanes, but I confess to a flicker of envy that previous generations of pilots were permitted to smoke in flight, sitting before the broad cockpit windows of a 747, “a cigarette in one hand, a map of creation / in the other,” as Philip Levine wrote in “The Poem of Flight.”

A few years later when I’m flying a real 747, I flick open the ashtray, and in the bottom of it is a tiny Hello Kitty sticker. I don’t know who put this here, or why; I have to assume it was on a trip back from Japan, and probably after smoking was banned, as the sticker appears unmarked by ashes. I fly four dozen different 747s, and I never remember which one Hello Kitty flies on; until well into the flight, invariably over some desolate landscape, I idly open the cover of the ashtray and discover our unlikely stowaway.

One surprise the cockpit offers is how ridiculously small the switches that control important appendages and systems are. I was intrigued when I first learned to fly airliners that, unlike in a car, there is no ignition key. The simulator, which requires a computer log-on, and the occasional complicated reboot, is harder to get running than the real thing. The engines themselves are started, usually two at a time, with a series of thumb-sized switches. There are not many switches in the world that have so outsized but precise an effect as these; such enormous yet carefully calibrated consequences.

The sense of small controls determining large events is yet more vivid when it comes to the autopilot and its related systems. On long trips the autopilot is engaged for much of the time. Toward the end of the flight, when it is time to turn the autopilot off, the plane comes alive again. One quick press of a small button on the control column and the autopilot system instantly and completely disconnects. The plane is free. To take hold of the control column at this point and to turn it steadily, to watch the horizon tilt like a two-dimensional game board, the great panel of the world lifting, banking in response to my hands, is a feeling like nothing else.

Often, though, when I take family, friends, or guests of my employer on visits to the flight simulator, they are more amazed by the automation systems than they are by the experiences of flying or landing. Without touching the control column, in three or four seconds I could direct the plane to the North Pole, and then reverse my instruction and aim instead for the South Pole.

In the vertical sense autopilots have a number of different functions or modes—
VNAV,
or
vertical navigation,
is the telltale portion of modes like
VNAV PTH
,
VNAV ALT,
VNAV SPD.
But even in the lateral sense—the left-right direction in which the plane is pointing—autopilots have a surprisingly varied menu. Because the plane may roll left or right around its long, nose-to-tail axis to fulfill the instructions given to the autopilot, these functions are collectively called
roll modes,
a kind of turning that the Wright brothers borrowed from the birds—vultures, in particular—they so carefully watched. One of the simplest roll modes turns the plane onto a selected heading, which it will then maintain across the whole world until the pilot selects a different mode. The dial for selecting the heading is called the
heading selector.
Turn this dial, roughly the size of a dime, to turn a 747.

Certain kinds of clouds tend to produce turbulence. Pilots can try to avoid these clouds by looking out the window and flicking the heading dial a few degrees this way, a degree that way. To spin this dial and feel 380 tons of aircraft roll to one side or the other, to see the earth tilt in response, is a thrilling sensation. Sometimes, the required heading changes even before the first turn is completed, and we must turn the heading selector in the opposite direction. My index finger and thumb barely move but the dial spins and the whole world, simulated or otherwise, tilts and rolls, as the craft obligingly reverses itself.

—

It’s early December, a month or so after my initial visit to the simulator, when as a pilot I first enter a real 747 “for the purpose of flight,” as the legal definition of departure intones. Unlike for my flights in the simulator, this time I need luggage, a toothbrush. And instead of walking across a detachable bridge to the floating box on stilts in a cavernous warehouse, I walk through the terminal full of passengers, down the jetway, and onto the main deck of the craft that is already being loaded and victualed. I climb upstairs and walk down the upper deck toward my new office. After so many weeks in the simulator it comes as a surprise that the rest of the plane—all of the vessel that lies behind the cockpit, that the simulator so diligently imagined for us in the long hours we sat surrounded by its wizardry—is present.

We load the route to Hong Kong, which is four times as long as any route I have ever before loaded into a flight computer. On these very long flights—London to Hong Kong, a route that hasn’t been possible nonstop for all that many years—the historical backlight to the string the digital waypoints form across the earth is unmistakable. The plane can’t know that perhaps no other pair of cities is so tightly bound across such physical and cultural distance, though it might guess from its frequent journeys between the two.

At this hour we are going to use full power for takeoff, the captain reminds me. This, counterintuitively, is one form of noise-reduction measure. The extra thrust will help us reach the altitude at which we reduce power more quickly, and so the horizontal extent of our noise footprint is reduced. Full-power takeoffs are a rarity on the 747, which is blessed with more power than we’ll almost ever need. Many pilots remark that the sound of its engines actually becomes lower pitched at higher thrust settings; a force that at its greatest magnitude is felt more than heard.

We lift off and speed through the night and then the 747, as aircraft on long easterly flights often do, devours the entire next day as well. So it’s on the second evening of the flight that we bank around Lantau Island and line up for the northerly of the two runways at Chek Lap Kok, the airport, opened in 1998, that pilots still refer to as “the new one,” if they ever flew the famously harrowing approaches to the old airport at Kai Tak. Skyscrapers and ferries flip past dimly in the haze below, followed by lights on the tops of hills, then more broad, inky water. A few thousand feet above this new earth comes the electrifying moment when I press the button by my right thumb to disconnect the autopilot, and the button by my left thumb to disconnect the autothrottle, a sort of cruise control that on the 747 is usually disengaged before landing. The humid dusk is depthless, there is no natural horizon; the runway lights appear to float in this dark and featureless sky, then gradually refine and clarify themselves.

Later that evening we are in a bar, where the senior captain buys me a beer. He asks me how it feels, then laughs and waves his hand in front of my face when I don’t respond. I apologize and snap back to Hong Kong, from my daydream about how we left London so many miles and hours ago. I’d been thinking about taxiing the actual airplane out to the runway last night, an experience I had already experienced so many times in the simulator; and marveling at how two physically and visually identical experiences could be so different. I’d been hearing again the voice of the controller who cleared us for takeoff. The captain acknowledged this clearance on the radio in the standard way. He’d then held his hands out, palms up, smiled—for he had known this day himself—and said: “Mark, here you go. Let’s go.”

Air

Air, in general parlance, is almost always an absence. A synonym for nothing. “It came out of the blue.” “It vanished into thin air.” Air is so devoid of imaginative weight that Galileo’s discovery of its actual weight shocked the scientific world. Imagine a cube of ordinary sea-level air, a yard on each side. It weighs about 2 pounds—about the same as a liter or quart of water. Or, the next time you are lying on a picnic blanket and you gaze up at the contrail of a passing plane, consider that a round column of air only half an inch across—about the diameter of your iris—running from the earth’s surface all the way up to outer space, contains around 2.5 pounds of air. Or that a typical picnic blanket—6 feet by 9 feet, say—has around 50 tons of air resting upon it.

To me, the truth that air is as substantive as concrete remains as counterintuitive as any of science’s most inscrutable revelations about particles that exist in two places at once, or the unseen dark matter we are told comprises most of the universe. Little in daily life suggests that the air weighs down upon me as matter-of-factly as water rests on the bottom of an aquarium; that each day I awake and stand up and walk through insensible thickness.

The writer David Foster Wallace once related a tale of an old fish who asks a pair of young fish how the water is that day. The young fish are mystified; they do not know what water is.

Flight reminds us to ask: How is the air? The air is so marvelously alive that when I land from a flight and later take a walk under an open sky, I know I have left all the most physically dramatic activities of the natural world behind me, above me. And when we fly we confront many of our earthbound assumptions that would otherwise remain as unchallenged as the apparent emptiness of the air itself. There is a reason airliners have devices called
air data computers.
A pilot must learn to speak of at least four kinds of speed, and several more of temperature, distance, and altitude. These aren’t questions of terminology or curiosities that appear only at the extremes of experience. They are the truths of the medium that sustains us, truths revealed to us by flight.

Of course, those who love to fly might be grateful that it’s so hard to consider the air directly. The imperceptibility of air is surely one of the reasons flying entrances us. We find peace in the watery flights of fish and the sun’s rays through their clear medium; and many of us love to swim or dive for the same reason. When a bird or, behind closed eyelids, our dreaming self flies up into the sky, when something detaches from the low world, it appears to cast off not only gravity and place, but much of its corporality and boundedness. The grace of flight, of movement unsupported by water or wheels, by rock or grass or anything sensible at all, is the simplest explanation for its long reign as a synonym for transcendence.

—

I sometimes take the Long Island Rail Road between Jamaica Station near Kennedy Airport and Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. On this journey I have one of those inconsequentially strict routines that guide so much of daily life. When I am going
to
the airport, I almost always walk a little further up on 7th Avenue before heading into the station, to have the most time in the fresh air, even if it is raining or snowing.

But when I come in to the city, I walk as long as possible inside the station, in case it is raining or snowing!—or to linger in the air-conditioning. To draw out my indoor moment I walk through the New Jersey Transit concourse, to exit at 31st Street. Here, occasionally, my eye is caught by a fragment of Walt Whitman on the station’s tiled wall: “This is the common air that bathes the globe.” (In another poem Whitman extolled the “fierce-throated beauty” of locomotives, “launch’d o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes, / To the free skies unpent and glad and strong”—reason to speculate on what he would have made of airliners.)

The substance of flight is that air appears to have none at all. But it’s worthwhile, just occasionally, to try to consider Whitman’s commonwealth of air as directly as we can.

You might think of a journey by air first as a length. Imagine the line of your flight, not along the earth as we normally envisage it, but above it in the sky, slicing through our common air. The path cuts a narrow, staggeringly long portion of the atmosphere, a nearly linear volume that you travel through, and breathe from, after the engines compress it into something thick enough to sustain you.