Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (30 page)

Late one year, not long before my mother died, I decided to switch to an electronic logbook. It was close to Christmas and I was at home in Massachusetts, so my mother and I would go to a coffee shop we both liked and sit for hours drinking hot chocolate. She would read her book or the local newspaper while I typed the handwritten details of hundreds of old flights into the new computer program on my laptop, a tedious task that made her smile in sympathy whenever she looked over, although I now remember it with an almost unbearable fondness. Often, when I came across the name of a colleague, I would gaze up through the snow falling outside the window, trying to remember the face of the captain I had flown with to Rome or Lisbon or Sofia one autumn evening a few years earlier, or something from the hours of conversation we had shared.

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For many pilots their strongest personal bonds with other pilots come not from work but from their training days. In many countries, especially outside the United States, it’s common for aspiring airline pilots to complete a residential course together over eighteen months or so, before they perhaps go on to join the same airline. Those on such a course may become friends for life—friends because they spent a year or two training as part of a team that did not change, for a job in which the team always changes.

I am in Hong Kong. It’s late on a steamy morning, the day after my arrival. I’m on the Kowloon side of the harbor, sitting at a café with free Internet access, something airline crews learn to sniff out as effectively as any backpacker. I see an online post from a pilot friend, from my flying course: “When you go to flying college, they never explain the odd things you’ll one day do, like sit alone late in a Chinese restaurant in Cairo listening to the local band murder soft rock.” We have all known the occasional night like this and we post comments in sympathy—perhaps from an Egyptian restaurant in Beijing.

Very rarely I may see a friend from my own training course overseas, when our trips overlap at a busy destination. And most rarely of all, I may actually fly with a friend. Each time it happens—perhaps ten times in total, so far—I have been excited for weeks in advance. If the disadvantages of my job include the lack of a fixed set of colleagues, and the time spent away from friends and family, then it’s hard not to smile when I am with a friend at work, as if it were any job, except that we’re watching the approach of dawn over the Indian Ocean, or the coastal ranges of Greenland. This friend, this work; there’s nothing else to ask of a day.

In my experience it is common for pilots to train in pairs. In a small plane, this allows one pilot to watch both the other trainee and the instructor from the backseat; and in the simulator-based training for airliners that are flown by two pilots, the “flights” run most smoothly when there are two pilots at the controls, one in the flying and one in the monitoring role, while the instructor directs and corrects from behind. Sometimes after a training exercise we watch a video of our interactions with the other pilot, so the instructor can point out, for example, when I asked a leading as opposed to an open-ended question.

When I did my visual flight training, in that small plane in Arizona, I was paired with a pilot who has since become a good friend. Sometimes we did solo flights, alone in the plane. But whenever we flew with an instructor, the other was always in the backseat.

One morning we realized that we both had solo flights scheduled. So we taxied out in sequence, and after takeoff we found each other and flew off in tandem from Phoenix south to Tucson. After a huge breakfast we refueled the planes, too, then took off again in rapid sequence. We flew west, not far at all from each other, a school of just two fish, two friends racing each other across the tawny, hauntingly remote mountainscapes of the Cabeza Prieta refuge. We were headed to Yuma, on the Colorado River near where Arizona, California, and Mexico meet.

As we flew we talked on the radio about the land below, or the barbecue that the other trainees were having that evening, or the movie we would go to see, and this bright connection over the blue—rather than air-traffic control or weather reports—suddenly seemed the purpose of radios, the reason radios were the first electronics installed on airplanes. Even as I flew I hoped I would not forget this, that early one winter’s day a new friend and I flew within sight of each other across the desert and talked about nothing in particular.

It’s a day I remember whenever I am flying in an airliner and a friend’s voice suddenly joins the same radio frequency I am on. Our world-crossed schedules have brought us to what we could never have planned: to the same room of the sky. Occasionally I hear a friend descending to New York at the end of a flight from London, as I am climbing away from New York, as if we alone were personally charged with the maintenance of some unappreciated equilibrium between the two cities. When a friend appears on frequency, we don’t chat, but if it’s not busy I may dare a quick hello across this exclusive yet most public medium. I will almost never see their airplane or have any idea where they are. I will probably not even know where they are going. Then one of us will change frequency, leave without farewell, ships in the night.

I am in the cockpit, flying from Vancouver to London. Only minutes after departure the city stops and the mountains rise. Thin veins of light run along the valleys below, as if a broad flat place had been folded and the lights had tumbled down the steep sides into the crease. Even these lights linger only in the climbing terrain, and then a world begins that looks much as if there were no people at all upon it. It is a sense that persists long across the night, across the taiga and the tundra and Greenland and several seas until landfall comes over Scotland. It is one of the loneliest routes.

During one of the routine conversations over the intercom system that connects pilots to flight attendants on a large aircraft, one of the crew tells us that a colleague is weeks from retirement. In the slightly wearying game that will be familiar to flight attendants and pilots on big airplanes everywhere, we start calling the dozen-plus intercom stations dotted around the aircraft until we find her. We suggest that she might like to come to the cockpit for the landing in London and, after breakfast is served, she does. I am the heavy, the extra pilot today, so she and I sit behind the other two pilots as the hedgerows of the Chilterns scroll beneath our wings like the webbed cracks on an aged oil painting, erasing thoughts of yesterday’s dusk in Vancouver and the sunset embers on the icy peaks that guard the city we left. I ask if she has been in the cockpit recently for landing. No, she says, not recently. She mentions that she’s married to a former 747 pilot and that she hasn’t watched a landing from the cockpit since he retired a few years earlier.

I ask if she and her husband were able to fly together often during their paired careers. She nods. We loved Cape Town, Singapore, Hong Kong, she says, with a smile. I think of the 747 we are in, of its eventual retirement and that of her husband, which has already taken place. Of hers soon and of my own some day, too.

It occurs to me sometimes that a working life spent among so many colleagues, the teams that disassemble as cleanly as they formed, might be something people are glad to leave behind at the end of their career. I ask her if her husband misses his work. She answers while looking away, out of the window at the turn of England. Oh yes, she says, he does. He misses the people. I ask her if she means that he misses the many hundreds of fellow pilots he must have met in a long career, or the thousands of cabin crew, or his colleagues on the ground, or the passengers themselves. Oh, he misses all of them. Everyone, she laughs, looking left over Windsor as the runway rises ahead of us and the great wheels lower.

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I don’t know many pilots from other airlines. On the radio, we rarely speak directly to one another; mostly we interact with controllers, although we do not know them really, either.

A pilot may come to know the voices of the controllers at their home airport, even if it’s a busy place. Once I visited the control tower at Heathrow, and I was happy to put faces and names to the voices I had heard for so many years—the voices that to a pilot based there are as recognizable and welcoming a feature of home as Richmond Park or Wraysbury Reservoir, when after so many long hours over foreign places they sail past the cockpit windows of the homeward-descending jet. But I have never learned to recognize the individual voices of the controllers at any other airports or of the controllers who cover the airspace in between.

Sometimes two planes fly the same route at the same time, separated from each other only vertically. Such planes may fly within close sight of each other for half an hour or so, until they are pulled apart by the differences in their speeds and the winds. I have occasionally heard one pilot tell another over the radio that they have taken a photo; they then exchange e-mail addresses. I like pictures of airliners well enough, but a picture of an airliner that I am myself flying, over the Atlantic or Namibia or the Andaman Sea, would be something else entirely, especially precious as a gift from another pilot I will never meet. I still have the photo my friend and training partner took of me in a small plane, when we flew together over southern Arizona.

Often we know we are near other planes because even though we cannot see them, we can hear them talking on a common radio frequency, memorably enumerated 123.45. It’s used most often to advise other pilots about turbulence, though sometimes it’s used for jokes or to discuss something extraordinary we can all plainly see—a meteor shower, auroras, the striking proximity of Venus and Jupiter in the sky before an eastbound audience of up-all-night pilots crossing the dark waters of the Atlantic. If you have ever asked your crew to find out the result of an election or the score of a game that is in progress, they probably used this frequency. As Internet access spreads to the sky, such requests will be something that only pilots remember from a less-connected world.

I heard a story once, that in the 1970s the British tax authorities briefly embargoed or placed a heavy duty on aircraft radios, thinking they were for entertainment. Sometimes a burst of music is played on 123.45; sometimes you even hear a passage of singing on this frequency, followed by a chorus of don’t-give-up-your-day-job jibes.

I am over the North Atlantic, halfway to New York. At this stage in flight my communications panel, my
box,
is typically set to broadcast four separate audio streams into my headset: the shared frequency, 123.45; another frequency reserved for urgent matters not related to sports scores; the voice from the captain’s microphone; and the communication line to the cabin crew. It’s a cacophony that takes some getting used to. We are in the middle of the tracks, those imposing lines of wind-optimized North Atlantic routes published anew for the westbound and eastbound flights of each day and night above the ocean. The common frequency is mostly quiet. A pilot reports turbulence ahead, but we listen and hear that she is at a different altitude, on a different track.

Suddenly I hear an American accent ask if a certain flight from another airline is listening to the common frequency. Yes, a French-accented male voice responds a moment later, we are here.

The American pilot explains that his wife and daughter are on the French pilot’s plane. He asks if the French pilot could arrange for the crew to find their seats and tell them that he says hello, from not so far away in the sky. It’s rare on this frequency to hear anything other than clipped exchanges of aviation terminology, sports scores, and colorful banter. Surely everyone in this region of the sky, every pilot within several hundred miles, is now listening.

The French pilot agrees. But the next voice on the frequency, a few minutes later, is not the French or the American pilot or any other pilot. It is the American pilot’s wife. The French pilot has invited her into the cockpit. He has given her a headset and told her that she can speak to her husband, from her airplane to his, though the two planes are not even in sight of each other. The American pilot responds instantly, half laughing, to her voice ringing out to him—and to everyone else over a large circle of the Atlantic Ocean. In his whole life the spheres of home and work will never again meet this way, on a crackling electric bridge in the blue.

—

Whenever I read a reference to some new software that promises to connect us more easily to one another, I think about how such technology has changed the lives of airline crews, allowing them to stay in touch with home in a way that would have amazed our predecessors. But I’m also pleased by the thought of how airplanes combine a technical modernity with an antiquely physical power to connect. Other connections are little more than metaphors in comparison, mere shadows of the actual motion of one person to the city or table or arms of another, cities or tables or arms where almost always they would rather be.

Airports are by definition emotional places. When I think back to the visits my mother made to London, for example, I may remember us in the British Museum or strolling through Green Park; but what I remember most is seeing her when the doors of the baggage hall at Heathrow opened. When my grandfather died, my father flew ahead of us to Belgium. My brother and I, still only teenagers, followed a few days later. As the two of us boarded the plane at Kennedy airport, on a trip that a week earlier we had no idea we would make, I realized for the first time that someone had meant to our dad what he meant to us.

People fly for many reasons. But the calculus narrows considerably as calendars and circumstance close in upon a specific flight. The plane is a narrow channel between two lakes of place, a bottleneck between the sloshing social randomness of daily life in each of two distant cities. Sometimes this effect is extreme: there’s a conference, and half the passengers are computer engineers or physicists or archaeologists; or a large and raucous student group is traveling on perhaps their first-ever flight to a faraway place; or a group of elderly friends is flying out to Venice or Vancouver or Oslo together, to start the same cruise through some marvel of the world. On some routes, royalty feature regularly; on others, celebrities, oil workers, religious pilgrims, or aid workers may appear more often. I did not expect my work to reveal so clearly the circulations of humanity in this age, the spectrum of impulses, ancient and otherwise, that may direct someone today to set course across the planet.