Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (22 page)

The flight computers can plot
abeam points
to tell us, for example, when we’ll pass closest to a place—the only nearby major airport along a remote stretch of our route, for example—that we won’t overfly directly. “We’re abeam Luanda.” Until now the Angolan capital’s airport has only gotten closer, but from the abeam point it recedes. I sometimes catch myself using
abeam
by accident when giving driving directions: “You’ll see the driveway when you’re abeam the red silo.”

I like the words for the patterned striations of cloud known as
herringbone
or
mackerel,
the ichthyology of our sea-sky. We speak, too, of
port
and
starboard.
There’s a story that the term
posh
derives from a preference for cabins on the shady side of ships sailing from Britain to India—“port out, starboard home.” It’s false, apparently, only a pleasing tale. But this precise phrase is echoed in certain cockpits. Many systems on an airliner are duplicated, and we can turn a switch left or right in order to select which system the aircraft uses. It makes sense to use both regularly, if only to know when one of the two has stopped working. When I started flying the 747, the standard was to use the left-hand system when leaving London and the right-hand when returning to it: “port out, starboard home,” the words of the legend printed right in the sober font of the flying manual. Starboard home, at least, remains a fine rule when sailing to Heathrow. If the wind is from the west the best prospects of London come to those on the right side of the plane, where copilots always sit, consoled by the view of what Churchill called “this mighty imperial city” as they wait to become captains.

When one pilot leaves their seat, they occasionally say to the other, only half-jokingly: “You have the conn”: you have the ship, you are in control now on the flight
deck.
The lighter terms for the cockpit itself, when we answer calls from the cabin on the interphone system, all have a maritime bent: “This is Mark on the bridge” or “You’ve reached Nigel in the engine room.” A friend who flies a small plane tells me he will not fly today because it is too windy over the hills near where he lives; he says the sky will be turbulent, the wind “like water over rocks in a stream.” We refer to the turbulence that drifts off mountain ranges as
mountain waves.
North–south flights often cross the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a region near the equator. The trade winds converge here and the rising moist air fuels storms we must always watch out for, in the place known to sailors on the sea below us as the Doldrums.

Sadly, to me, we don’t use
fathoms
for altitude in aviation. But our speed is measured in
knots;
what remains of us after our passage is our
wake.
When we arrive on a plane, we check its voluminous technical
log;
a jet without many entries is a
clean ship.
Such words remind pilots that the business of guiding vessels between blue-parted cities is an old one, and that our world is dominated by water, hardly less than that of the vessels that gave us language.

—

It’s September 2002, and I am in Kidlington, north of Oxford. I’ve left my consulting company to start my flight training. In fact, I’ve nearly finished this training. I’ve completed all my written and airborne exams for my commercial pilot’s license, but not without a last-minute hiccup.

Flight training is divided into visual flying, in which we look out the window to see where we are going; following mountain ridges and roads and railways along a map or through our memory; and instrument flying, in which we can fly safely in cloud, guided by the onboard instruments. Like many pilots who train in Europe, I was sent to complete my visual flight training in the generally cloudless skies of Arizona, where the weather is perfect for it, and there are enough ranches for British instructors to use the same
Father Ted–
inspired instruction techniques they might deploy at home: “Push the control column forward, cows get bigger. Pull back, cows get smaller.” After my visual training I returned to Europe, where the skies’ tendency toward gray, cow-obscuring weather is equally well suited to instrument flying.

The most basic maneuver of this phase of training is an instrument approach. We descend toward the runway, typically following a radio aid on the ground. Then, just before landing, we change to visual flying. We land by looking out of the window, as we would if there had been no clouds at all—but only, of course, if we can see enough of the runway or its lighting to do so. At a certain minimum altitude, perhaps a few hundred feet above the ground, we must decide if we can see enough ahead of us to make this switch from the instruments to visual flight. If we cannot—if we are still in cloud, or snow or heavy rain or fog or whatever incarnation of high water might be impeding our view of the runway—then we abort the landing. We
go around,
we conduct a
missed approach.
Then we try again, or enter a holding pattern to wait for the weather to improve, or we fly away to land somewhere else.

For training, even in northwestern Europe, we cannot rely on thick clouds that terminate exactly at that minimum altitude. In order to simulate such weather
on minimums,
instructors must therefore go to some trouble to blind their students to the outside world. In one of those oddly basic solutions that dot the high-technology field of aviation, instructors temporarily install a set of translucent screens all around the trainee’s side of the cockpit, or require us to wear such
view-limiting devices
as a visor-like hood or
foggles.
When the
screens are up,
or we are
under the hood,
we can see only the instrument panel; nothing of the outside world. At the specified height the instructor will either remove the forward screen, allowing us to see enough to land, or they will leave it in place, forcing us to go around. On a twin-engine plane, at the point at which we abort the landing and climb away, the instructor may simultaneously reduce thrust on one of the engines to idle, simulating an engine failure at one of the most challenging points of flight.

During my final instrument exam, as we approached the minimum altitude for a runway near Bristol, the examiner reached up and began to move one of the screens. So I continued the descent for a second or two, as I could now just see the runway ahead and I thought he was in the process of removing the screens entirely. But he didn’t. He then turned to me and said: “You have committed the cardinal sin of instrument flying. You have continued an approach below the minimum altitude without the appropriate visual reference.” Crushed, I turned the plane back to our home airport.

The next day I repeat that portion of the exam with more success. I am at last in the clear, I think, a phrase that gets an understandable amount of airtime among pilots undergoing instrument training. But the following day my instructor calls. He tells me that there’s a problem with my license. Though I’ve completed all my exams, I don’t have quite enough hours in my logbook yet. We have to go flying, he says, “we have to go up”—for at least three hours and thirteen minutes.

“Where are we going?” I ask. “Wherever you like,” he replies with a smile. It’s an answer that aspiring commercial pilots, on a tight and expensive training schedule, do not hear all that often. So even before we took off it had the makings of a great day: a plane, a warm late-summer afternoon, blessedly clear skies all across southern England, no fixed itinerary. I was even allowed to invite a friend along.

We lift into the blue and head south toward the coast, following the edge of the Channel toward Eastbourne, Hastings, Dover. “Have you been to Canterbury?” the instructor asks. I have not. We bank to the northwest, near enough to see the cathedral. The very first cumulus clouds begin to form in the afternoon heat. We turn north toward the estuary of the Thames, crossing its waters with the sea on our right, while on our left the river, that in later years will become by far the one I know best from the air, winds upstream and disappears into the haze of the capital. We head across Essex and Suffolk, toward Norfolk and the Fens that might be the Netherlands, just across the sea.

Several American fighters from a nearby military base parallel us. It is like a Porsche racing a bicycle. Their extraordinary speed, as they rocket past us, shows us more than how slow we are; it gives the illusion that we are flying in reverse.

As we turn back toward Oxford we see the puffy billows of water are now blossoming all over southeast England, called up by the afternoon sun, as densely and randomly as dandelions in a field. For perhaps the most joyful half hour I will ever spend in the sky, I bank the plane left and right, frolicking and dodging through gaps that so many unseen calculations of the air and sun and earth have left.

I try to pin down what this sense of weaving reminds me of. The visual effect resembles a lower-stakes crossing of an asteroid field in a science-fiction movie. But such physical interactions with the clouds feel more like some aerial emancipation of downhill skiing, the quick alternation of dramatic lefts and rights, the sense of slipping forward even as I make sharp turns around a fleecier species of mogul. I turn back to my friend. She smiles and gives me two thumbs-up. The instructor, too, is apparently enjoying himself. After we land he remarks that such flights, with freshly minted pilots who are not under the shadow of formal instruction or exams, are a rare treat for him, too.

Since that day I’ve often been startled by the perfect joyfulness of flying close to clouds. The smallest clouds may be no more than tens of yards across. That is larger than the small plane I was flying, but smaller than a 747. Perhaps, for brains designed to maneuver us quickly through tight and dangerous places, it provides a kind of mischievous transcendence to dive between such white-hard arrangements of ethereality, near-absences that bear the visual weight of mountains.

It’s an even greater pleasure to sail right through them. To fly directly into the billowing illusions of towering substance as if they were nothing—or as if it were us that were without corporality—is, to a new pilot, an entirely separate order of aerial pleasure. We close on structures that may be smaller than the plane, or the size of cities, clouds like sky lakes, their edges rotated into three dimensions of white shore; then we are amid the total, white nothing. That is, almost nothing. There is often just enough of a jolt when we enter a cloud, a quick rumble as we dive into the difference of sky, to remind us of the difference in sky-circumstance that explains why a cloud is there at all. Then we fly out the other side, and it all returns in the cleanest instant. There it is; the world, again.

Fluffy cumulus are the clouds I love best; they are flying high, on cloud nine, in seventh heaven; they are walking on air. They are the clouds that fill rococo artworks or that are painted upon faux skylights in the ceilings of the New York Public Library and Versailles. Even these, the most exuberant of clouds, seem to possess a slow, dignified consciousness, a feeling that’s enhanced by our ability, from the windows of airplanes, to directly observe not only their movements but also their barely perceptible growth. If you have ever been on a whale watch, moving among clouds has something of the same quality—the sense that these enormous, lounging creatures are directed by steadier lights; that they can hardly notice something as small and jittery as us, and inhabit frames of time that we have lost.

Of course, 747s do not linger in playful summer cumulus that provides such delight to new pilots. Except for brief periods around takeoff and landing we mostly see these happy clouds from above, where the pleasure they give, like a memorable tale or joke, often takes the form of an unexpected reversal. Seen from cruising altitude, cumulus clouds—the connected parentheses or arcs cut from circles as children draw them—lie surprisingly close on the world. Like fireworks as we understand them from an airplane, they are basically ground events.

As we look down upon such clouds, upon what more typically looks down upon us, we realize that today it’s the planet, not the sky, that is partly cloudy. This, I think, may be what I’ll miss most after I retire—this customary, daily view of the gathered thoughts of our home skies; the low world beneath its eaves of water.

Often clouds form over land in the rising heat of the day, but fail to do so over nearby open water. On one memorable afternoon during my first summer on the 747, I flew west from London to New York. All of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, and the southern Welsh coast were dotted with clouds, while the sea off these places itself remained as blue-clear as the sky above. In this way the clouds were a self-portrait of the land drawn by its own rising warmth, a mirroring cartography of mist, and also a kind of inverted sky-hourglass that measured out the lateness of the afternoon. Such cloudscapes often form over an island-dotted sea, where they form an aerial archipelago all their own, a map we can read long before we overfly the land it encodes.

Other days, though far from land, occasional cumulus clouds scatter above the open sea, each casting a small pool of darkness onto the oceanic blue. Here there’s no earth to make sense of the patterns, no codex to the chaos of air instabilities that would answer the same question—why here?—raised by a lone tree standing in a meadow.

Contrails
are a contraction of
condensation trails;
they can cover 5 percent of the busiest skies and may be described as man-made clouds. We see, too, their opposite. Sometimes a plane below us passes through the top edge of a cloud and the swirling heat of its engines will cut a trench right through it, and so the airplane leaves not a white trail in clear sky but a clear trail in a white one; a rare sight we might call an anti-contrail.

Sometimes an uneven wind, which we can feel in the cockpit is choppy, scatters the white contrails left by the airplane ahead of us, disassembling their rectitude and writing the turbulence on the blue in a freely tumbling white cursive. At other times a steady high breeze takes the contrail, immediately lifting this record of a jet’s passage whole in one direction across the sky, away from the route we share; the drifting contrail is then a time stamp of the aircraft that made it. From the ground you can observe the formation of such wind-borne diasporas of contrails, when a plane passes and its after-cloud floats surprisingly quickly across anything high and steady in your line of sight—electrical wires, say, or the branches of a tree.