Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (25 page)

The controllers instruct us to descend quite low, typically a clue that they plan our journey back to the airport to be short. But for some reason that we aren’t told—perhaps another arriving flight has an ill passenger, or an animal has been spotted on the runway—we are instructed to maintain our southerly heading.

Between the clouds we catch the briefest sight of Cape Point, as we fly past the boxy terrain symbols on our screen that correspond to it, though of course nothing on the screen distinguishes them as among history’s most significant rocks in the sky; to us they are not even named. Now we are over open water. Ahead are the foothills of the Southern Ocean; further still and unseen is the landless planetary belt of gale-tossed icy seas, the latitudes known as the Roaring Forties: Antarctica. The Cape, while not quite the most southerly point of Africa, is closer to the South Pole than Sydney or São Paulo. This unexpectedly long routing surely takes nearly all of the passengers to the southern zenith of their lives—a record that I myself would not break until I flew to Buenos Aires.

The flight is choppy in the squally winds. Rain showers pour from narrow, scattered towers of cloud. We fly through these streaming beams of rain, and then out into brief white-walled caverns of sunlight, through which brilliance falls and accumulates in small blue puddles on the gray sea. A moment later we are again bouncing through the rain and mist, then back into sun. We forget that such a scene, though I’d never seen quite its like before, is our home at its most ordinary. If you descended to 3,000 feet above a random latitude and longitude on the planet, this is what you would be most likely to find: battleship clouds over heaving ocean, no land in sight.

We pass near and size up a lonely freighter, tipping like a seesaw in the house-high waves, the thicker turbulence of its older realm. Finally we’re instructed to turn: first east, then northeast. One last sharp turn as we lock onto the angled radio signal that drills up through the rain and mist, a beam we follow gratefully back to Africa.

Later, after a nap at the hotel, the rain has briefly stopped, and I have enough time before meeting the crew for dinner to drive down to Cape Point. It’s a popular destination—height above water at its finest—and often I recognize passengers from my own flight there, though none on this leaden day. I walk up to the lighthouse. When I lean over the stone lookouts around it, I see seabirds screaming vertically up misty cliff faces, and I feel the wind as I have never felt it before. I stare down at the crashing waves and, beyond, the blue-and-slate kaleidoscope of sun and shadow, and the inbound tumbleweed of the next round of showers.

On a post, arrows point wildly around, each marking the distance and direction to a far-off place. Just-landed pilots, like recently arrived passengers, may look at such a tree of cities with a mild incredulity, and perhaps feel a particularly forceful gust of place lag. One arrow points to Antarctica; roughly opposite is the arrow for London. I think of timbered ships and the Cape’s forgotten, stormy name, and I wonder if anyone was standing here by this lighthouse earlier today, to catch a glimpse of the 747 banking over the end of the Cape and the continent, or to hear the tuned thunder of the engines from within the wind-frayed clouds.

—

My father left the Congo in June 1958, flying first to Cairo, where he spent nine days, before traveling onward to Belgium. After further studies in Belgium he was sent to Brazil and for this journey he took a boat.

First, though, he took a train. As the sole passenger scheduled to board in Antwerp, he was asked by the shipping company if he wouldn’t mind coming to Hamburg, saving their vessel a stop. The harbor and river of that city were locked in an icy January fog, he wrote in his notes, and throughout the first night onboard the foghorn sounded constantly. One night later in this long, diagonal journey down the Atlantic, rocky seas swept all the cutlery and crockery from the dining-room tables. Without a word the waiters cleared and reset everything, and then they poured great jugs of water out over the tablecloths, to hold the new service in place.

Flights, too, from Europe to Brazil often experience turbulence in the mid-Atlantic, where occasionally at night I see the light of a lone ship on the sea below, as if a star has misplaced itself below the horizon. I look inside the cockpit for the name of the 747 I’m flying, a city name typically, still sometimes written on a small plaque, and I remember the name of my father’s ship, the
Santa Elena,
operated by the Hamburg Südamerikanische Dampfschifffahrts-Gesellschaft. A lifelong student of languages, he was pleased with a name like that; pleased that the company had not yet adopted spelling reforms that then favored the elimination of three consecutive f’s. He was already learning Portuguese, a language, he wrote, whose vowels seemed to enjoy pooling together as intimately as German consonants.

When my mother traveled from America to Paris, she sailed on the SS
France
—for some time the longest passenger ship in history, built by a shipyard named the Chantiers de l’Atlantique. This name makes me wish we might someday christen an airplane factory something like it. I work at the Seattle Sky Yards, an engineer might say, or at the Chantiers du Ciel in Toulouse. By the late 1950s more people traveled by airplane than ship between Europe and America. My mom returned to America in 1964, on an airplane. It was the first time she flew.

The temptation is strong, but it’s not quite right to think of airplanes as successors to ships. Passenger liners have all but disappeared and aviation, were it a country, would have the planet’s nineteenth-largest economy. But there are more cargo ships and tankers than ever, steadily threading the world’s cities under the aircraft that reflect the language and tradition of a maritime age that has not ended so much as fallen from the popular imagination. Indeed, it is ships, even more than airplanes, that remind us that information technology and globalization are best regarded as separate revolutions which only occasionally overlap. There is nothing virtual about the exchange of physical goods, and far more of the world’s ever-greater volume of trade travels by boat than by plane.

Airline pilots will see this more clearly than almost anyone. The crowded harbors we fly over are often splendid—timeless and sepia-tinged no matter how shiny the lines or computer screens of the 747, or how utilitarian the modern contours of the lower vessels. Flying near a port I sense exactly the historical continuity that is otherwise hard to find in my job; not a different world so much as a more classical version of my own. When I fly over the thriving boatscapes of Antwerp or Hong Kong or Long Beach, I remember I’m only one of the most recent to find work in the bonds between distant cities.

Boston, historically and still in its self-imagination, is first of all a port, and its harbor remains a busy place. In echoes of both Kitty Hawk and the city’s maritime past, the busy runways of its airport stand so near to the water that mariners coming to Boston today might be forgiven for thinking they are about to dock at the airport; air passengers, meanwhile, might think they are on a seaplane, so late does proper New England ground appear in the window. Once I flew as a passenger from Shannon to Boston. We took off toward the sea and flew a southerly route that bypassed Maritime Canada before landing from the sea in Boston. Of the six or so hours of flight, the portions that took place over land amounted to less than thirty seconds.

When I lived in Boston I would walk to my consulting company’s office on the waterfront in the North End, on the street named Atlantic Avenue. At the top of our building was a small glass-walled room where anyone could go, which we called the Crow’s Nest. I would come here to work on presentations—or to spend a coffee break playing on the flight simulator on my laptop, before the wide view of the Inner Harbor and the airport beyond.

Years later, I’m a pilot, flying the 747 to Boston for the first time, within sight of my old office building. We sail south of the city and bank over the busy highways running toward the South Shore, then turn and line up for one of the northeast-running runways. As we descend toward the airport, the windscreen is crisscrossed by the many pleasure boats in the harbor, and a few sailing ships, their wakes twisting over the blue before the sober lines of the runways.

The city’s venerable harbor, I learn today, has a formal presence in the cockpits of the most modern airliners sailing to the city. When we calculate the minimum height to which we can descend without sight of the runway, we must sometimes account for the dimensions of an unexpected species of aerial obstacle—the masts or structures of ships sailing near the airport.

Today the clouds aren’t low, and we see the tallest sailing ship early enough, but even so we do not pass very high above it. When we are directly overhead, just when the broad lines of the 747 would most startle anyone on the decks below, we can no longer see the ship from the cockpit. Sails, too, are aerodynamic devices, wings of a fashion, and perhaps some gust of our passage descends to catch against their canvas; or our wake in the air echoes over the white trail their antique vessel leaves in the blue. Wood, metal, our shared dialect; from somewhere else in the city, someone has the right line across the harbor to see our wings cross above the billowing canvas, the bookends to the ages of Boston.

When I flew to Istanbul regularly, if the airport was busy, the air-traffic controllers would often send us on an extended tour of the Sea of Marmara. We could see clearly the situation of the ships in it, which were often stationary and had the appearance of waiting, as if for a Byzantine berth or an imperial audience. On a moonless night the water itself was without surface or depth, a matte-black mirror to the darkness above, and we saw only the lighted ships, a panel of scattered points steady on an unseen and tilted geometry, a night-bloom as magisterial as the eyes of waiting animals on a dark plain.

After landing we would go to our hotel, a dark, glassy skyscraper on the seafront. From a high floor and through the smoky windowpanes, the waiting ship lights seemed to hang in the sky, forming a kind of vessel-lanterned gate to the Bosporus. The lights of flights later than my own, winding across the pane before turning back toward the airport on the European side of the waters, then appeared to move among the vessels.

In so many languages the word
airport
equates to
air harbor
—
luchthaven
in Dutch, for example—something we may not immediately hear through our overfamiliarity with the English word, our “ports of the air,” or even in the pleasing tautology of Sky Harbor International airport in Phoenix—a name, though the landlocked city is surrounded by desert, that from the sky seems entirely at home.

You see many ships in the North Sea bound for the vast port at Rotterdam, as I did on that flight to Amsterdam, when the ships were the first thing I saw, crossing as if in the clouds. Nothing speaks quite so well of the Netherlands, of its character and more or less unending mercantile age, than the multitudes of ships that approach it at all hours, under the wings of your own ship descending to Schiphol—
Ship-
hol by some etymologies—the sky port where we land below sea level.

At the far end of Eurasia from Amsterdam stands Singapore, the fortress founded by Stamford Raffles, to challenge the far reaches of the Dutch Empire. (Raffles was born at sea. I do not know what paperwork was required off Jamaica in 1781, but we have a cockpit form to complete in the event of an in-flight birth, which asks for the time of birth in GMT and only the approximate position of the aircraft over the world.) Each time I land in Singapore I’m astounded all over again by the scale of maritime traffic in the waters around it. It’s a common place for ships to pass by, as well as to dock. From the air we see clearly what Raffles understood, that this is perhaps the most obvious place on the planet to lay the first stones of a trading post, a port, a great city.

From above I do not doubt what I have read, that something like one-quarter of the world’s trade, and an even larger share of the world’s sea-transported oil, passes through the Strait of Malacca. These fabled, shallow waters have given their name to the largest class of vessel that can pass here: Malaccamax. Sometimes I fly to Singapore only a few days after a flight to a city on the Persian Gulf, above which it can be so hazy that it is sometimes hard to see the water at all, and the many tankers pointed in all directions appear to be flying, too, with the stately awkwardness of spaceships on a movie screen. Perhaps, the sight of a vessel approaching Singapore reminds me, I flew over this ship somewhere else; or perhaps the fuel in the tanks of this 747 moved in the holds of the very ship steaming steadily below it.

Close to the airport, in the Strait of Singapore, there are so many ships that you can begin to lose the awareness that you are looking at a waterborne scene. The effect is hard to grasp, as if someone had scattered hundreds of matchboxes over the kitchen floor. You must be mistaken, you tell yourself, something so numerous must be something smaller than ships. The planes above, their far-born, nearly-complete journeys winding over some of the planet’s most crowded waters to the busy runways of Changi airport, mirror the stately chaos of commerce below. I do not know of any place where the history of a city and such an aerial snapshot of our age overlay each other as perfectly as they do here.

At Singapore, as at Boston, as at Copenhagen and Bermuda, our cockpit procedures are harmonized not just to the language of ships but to the height of the present-day vessels on the water below us. Our arrival charts here warn of high
maritime vessels,
a term that for nearly all of recorded history would have been redundant but that now draws a pleasingly necessary distinction for the pilots of airships. At takeoff for the return flight to London, the plane is inevitably heavy with cargo and fuel for the longest route I fly. But our takeoff power setting may be raised yet higher to account for the height of ships in the waters around Singapore—by their
air draft,
the path they make across our shared threshold to the sky.