Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (32 page)

I’m in the cockpit of an airliner at Heathrow that’s about to depart to Budapest. I’ve been an airline pilot for about a year, flying Airbus jets like this one to cities across Europe. All over the continent, the routes, the alignments of the waiting runways, the hotels where we sleep and the cafés where we meet for breakfast, the Europe-shaped maps formed of such places, are no longer new to me. Yet this flight feels as important as any in my life, as momentous as my first flight in a light aircraft as a teenager, my first solo flight in the skies of Arizona, or my first flight on an airliner, because my dad is onboard.

Or at least, he will be soon. The captain and I are on a
tour,
multiple flights over several days, each of which will end in the evening of a different city. We’ve been taking turns flying each leg. This is my leg—of course it must be, said the captain when I told him that my dad would be onboard. I’ve done the walk-around, the flight plan is loaded, our checks are complete, the cargo doors are closed, the pushback crew is below the plane, ready to roll. Nearly all the passengers are onboard. But I haven’t seen my dad yet. I have a sudden awareness that, unlike every other occasion in my life that one of us has waited for the other, tonight there is no question of waiting.

It’s December, not long before Christmas. My dad has been in England for about a week. A few days ago we went to walk around Cambridge on a dark and frosty not-quite-day and somehow were offered seats at the Carols from King’s College concert that would be broadcast on Christmas Eve. We sat in the chapel under the great stained-glass windows, mostly the work of Flemish glaziers, and under another Flemish masterpiece, Rubens’s
Adoration of the Magi.
My dad will stay longer in Budapest than I will; then he’ll head to Belgium, to Flanders, to visit his siblings and their families.

Suddenly I see him. He’s one of the last passengers to step onto the aircraft. He is speaking to one of the crew in the galley. The flight attendant brings him to the cockpit and I introduce him to the captain, one of the most senior in the company at the time, who smiles as my dad takes my picture in front of the controls. I explain a few of the buttons and systems to him, show him the digital map of our route. Though now a naturalized American, he is proud, I think, that I have started my career on a European airliner.

We hear the muffled ka-thump of the main cabin door closing, a starter gun familiar to waiting airline pilots everywhere. I reach for my headset, a little embarrassed that I have to ask my dad to leave the cockpit and go to his seat. I close and bolt the cockpit door. I call the controllers to ask for departure clearance. I speak to the pushback crew below the plane, enacting my side of a formal conversation that’s specified, word for word, in our manuals. “Brakes released,” I say. “Are we clear to start engines?” I ask, as we begin to move backward. “Clear to start number two,” responds the voice from below. The cockpit quiets as airflow is diverted away to the engines, a silence that gives way to an accelerating hum as the captain lights the engine under the right-hand wing. The left-hand column of my handwritten logbook records this moment: “Departure from Heathrow, 19:44.”

It’s been dark for hours already at this time of year. We taxi out, enjoying one of the pleasures of Heathrow at night that few other airports offer, a system of green and red taxiway lights that echoes the voice instructions of the controllers and visually directs our path across the airfield. There is no delay when we reach the runway. I set takeoff power. We accelerate and lift away from London, climbing over the southeast of England, passing Dover and the Channel Tunnel’s long approach roads and vast rail yards. Tunnels, of all things, are easy to see at night. A bouquet of light paths fans out from a point, as the narrowly confined journeys spread in their newfound freedom on the land. We cross the Channel. Minutes later we cross the far coast and I realize suddenly that I am flying my dad over his homeland.

On this clear winter night we pass Ostend, then Bruges, where he studied. I think of
The Nun’s Story,
the Audrey Hepburn movie. Her character traveled from a convent next door to where my father lived in Bruges, to the Congo, where he too would later move. When the director Fred Zinnemann arrived in the Congo, he picked the choir my father had started in the colony to sing onscreen. So from behind the camera my father conducted his choir, the other nuns, and Hepburn herself, and then he did it all again when Zinnemann noticed that the waving shadows of my father’s hands had fallen on the white habits. Next is Ghent, on the left. Then it’s me—on the right, and privileged with the near-darkness of the cockpit that renders the night land outside as bright as any of our computer screens—who sees my dad’s small hometown set among the lights of Flanders.

Belgium, for all its light, is gone in a matter of minutes. Soon we’re over southern Germany; then we pass near Linz, Vienna, Bratislava, following the Danube across the illuminated tapestry of Europe. I think of Europe so often in terms of its peripheral or coastal lands, but flights like this one remind me that just as I may think of Missouri or Kansas as iconically American, so, too does Europe have its heartlands, the central and inland places where culture and geography each lend much of their weight to the other. Ahead now are the lights of Budapest. We make a languid arc to the south of the city, then turn back to the northwest to make our approach to the easterly of the two parallel runways.

Like London, like Brussels and Vienna, like everywhere we saw tonight, Budapest is cold and clear. Not a breath of wind is sensed by the flight computers as we start the final approach and extend the flaps. I remember that my dad is onboard and I wonder for which one of us this experience is more unexpected. My dad sometimes said he wished he had become a scientist. I have a flicker of sadness about the rules that mean I can’t show him this view of the lights that lead to and mark the runway. He would love the way they look: technical but majestic.

A green bar that may edge out sideways, in
wing bars,
marks the beginning of the runway itself—the
threshold,
the liminal rite cast up in light. Before the lights of the runway itself come the approach lights. When it comes to approach lights, there are many schools of thought. Each runway’s complicated arrangement is identified on our charts by diagrams and acronyms that barely simplify them. Sometimes a stream of strobe lights races toward the runway—a
running rabbit,
as if airliners were greyhounds on a track. Some approach-light arrays are more than half a mile long and extend out far into open water, where their lanterned purpose appears more likely to be nautical than aerial. Sometimes, in mist or snow at night, particularly if the airport is surrounded by water, then for several minutes the runway lights can be all we see of the approaching world. Their patterns create a glorious visual momentum; long streams point and narrow toward the runway, cut by arrowing crossbars. Precision blooms in the windscreen.

As we descend toward Budapest the plane starts to speak to us. “TWO THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED,” it calls out. We lower the gear. The glittering patterns of lights, the lampposts of the returning world, are no longer only ahead of us; we are among them; they are streaming directly under the nose. By some grand luck, some pleasing and memorable coincidence of air and family, the landing is one of the smoothest I’ve ever made. We taxi to the gate, read the shutdown checklist. I complete the entry in my logbook: “Arrival in Budapest, 22:02. Dad onboard.”

When flying is spoken of in cultural or emotional terms, the sky is almost always light. The loveliest break with this rule—Saint-Exupéry’s
Night Flight
—describes a lower sky and a lower-wattage world, wonders that remain accessible to the intrepid pilots of small planes over rural or wild places but rarely to the modern air traveler, for whom it is easy to forget to look out at night. From an airliner the night world is more subtle than the day version, even from a dark cabin, and it’s certainly harder to photograph. And passengers who fly at night are often asleep or hoping to be.

But whether as a pilot or a passenger, I much prefer to fly at night. There is a delicacy that’s the opposite of the solar glare we must shield ourselves against, with sunglasses and elaborate phalanxes of sunshades that on long daylight flights migrate like the faces of sunflowers around the cockpit. Night flights are often smoother, too, without the sun to raise heat and turbulence from the earth’s surface.

The sense that in taking flight we leave behind the small concerns and low ceilings of daily life is markedly stronger at night. In conversation we may speak too negatively of a “dark night of the soul.” The poem by St. John of the Cross is not about despair but about a love that we can see more clearly at night, when the navigation light on the wing, rising over the sleeping lands and cities, may recall the “lantern bright” in one version of the poem; and, in another version, the night beauty of journeys that begin “in darkness…my house being wrapt in sleep.”

In the high night, too, are many phenomena we cannot see so clearly, if we see them at all, when the sun is up. There are nameless ships of cloud that seem to sail best under a bright moon. There are vast lobes of lightning, flashbulbing out from deep within the gray matter of distant equatorial thunderstorms, while on the windowpanes St. Elmo’s fire, a kind of static that appears in startling bursts of flat blue veins, flickers like Prufrock’s “nerves in patterns on a screen.” There are the empty, passing lands directly below us, dark and almost as far from us in our imaginations as the heavens. There are the flames, both man-made and natural, and more than we would ever imagine. And there are the illuminated manuscripts of cities and small places—the book they make of our lights under the dark-fallen hours, as if flight had been granted only to help us remember that there is a grace to the lights we place on the world; to remind us that everything we know is embowered by stars.

—

It was once said that the British Empire spanned so much of the globe that the sun would never set on it. An Indian-born professor of mine in college, when he found out I was moving to Britain, warned that after a few wintry weeks in the heart of the former empire I might find myself wondering whether the sun had ever risen on it. On the ground, sunset is often an unsatisfactory affair, affected or obliterated entirely by clouds, pollution, and weather, and further handicapped by the fact that, unless we are sailors or farmers, we rarely have a clear view both down to and along the horizon. Indeed, on an overcast day there is often no sign that either the earth or the unseen source of its illumination are celestial bodies. The sky gradually darkens in a generalized and directionless fade from damp gray to wet black.

By contrast, in the sky at high altitude, the coming of darkness is almost always pristine. Nearly every sunset I have seen in the sky would make me stop in my tracks if I saw it from the surface of the earth. It is an advantage of the profession an aspiring pilot may not have stopped to consider, that every sunset will be so perfect that we might roll our eyes if we saw its like on a postcard.

Flight also offers us an opportunity to both scramble and unveil the mechanics of our light and our sphere. Darkness comes to an airliner early or late. It may last unnaturally long, or it may come only in part before starting its retreat. Often darkness does not come at all. Night, on the ground, is experienced as time—nighttime, we call it. In the sky, the intrigues of darkness appear more sensible if we imagine night as a space—a geography of shadow that we can race toward or flee from, at speeds fast enough to accelerate the turning of the day or to all but hold the hands of a clock in place.

We might picture what we learned once in school but now may only rarely consider: the earth floating in the light of the sun. Using an apple and a flashlight can help remind us that at every moment the back of the planet is dark and the front is light. The two halves meet in a continuous belt around the earth where day and night are always beginning or ending, a great ring of light-meeting-dark. This ring is sometimes called the
terminator,
but the line is as much a beginning of light as an end. Along the ring it is always dawn or dusk—the names of two of Isak Dinesen’s Scotch deerhounds, incidentally, who when they accompanied her on safari would scatter the game like “all the stars of heaven running wild over the sky.”

From our earthbound and seemingly stationary perspective, we imagine that this ring moves over the earth, bringing to each place the familiar rolling pattern of light and time—dusk, night, dawn, day, dusk again. But really it’s the earth that turns, not the ring. We turn inside it. It’s perhaps easiest to picture if we imagine an observer on the sun, looking out at the ring. The ring is a hula hoop, upright on its rim; turned so that its center is open toward us, it always faces the sun directly. An observer on the sun would only ever see the daylight side of the planet. The boundary between day and night, between what such an observer can and can’t see, is the ring. The earth is turning inside the ring, from west to east—from left to right if you arbitrarily place the northern hemisphere on top, as nearly all our maps and globes do.

Picture a fixed point on the turning earth, your hometown perhaps. It turns into sunlight—it emerges from the dark side of the planet into day—as it crosses the ring’s left edge. Here is your dawn. Your hometown then passes into the naked daylight at the open front of the ring and moves across the front, across the day. Later, it crosses the right side of the ring. Here is dusk.

The ring helps to explain what happens to darkness and light in the air, especially on long-haul flights. When a plane lifts off from earth in daylight, it may move east. Then it is racing toward the dusk edge of the ring, over an earth that is already doing the same. Their easterly speeds add together, and dusk will come quickly to that plane—or, we should say, the plane will come quickly to dusk, to the right edge of the ring. The plane will speed into the darkness—into what we might just as sensibly call night space rather than nighttime—and may even race all the way around, back into dawn. Such are the abbreviated nights we experience on many eastbound flights, from North America to Europe, for example.