Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (8 page)

A sky country off West Africa is called Roberts. When I first saw this I was reminded of Robert FitzRoy, the meteorologist and the captain of Darwin’s ship HMS
Beagle,
because one of the areas in the BBC’s Shipping Forecast, FitzRoy, is named for him. These areas are an analogous kind of sea country, the white-capped conditions of which we may observe from above, and the names of which I became accustomed to when I flew early departures on the Airbus and would leave home long before dawn, drinking coffee and listening to the radio as I drove to Heathrow through the nearly empty wet-black streets of London. Roberts, the aerial region, takes its name from Liberia’s first president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, who was born in America and moved to Liberia when he was twenty. An enormous African sky will bear his name forever.

In Britain, London is a noun; yet the region north of it is an adjective, Scottish. “Contact now Scottish,” a London controller will say in farewell to a northbound aircraft. To a southbound jet, meanwhile, a Scottish controller will say: “Call London,” and it is hard not to think of the BBC World Service identification, “This is London,” or “This is London calling,” the old voices that shared this air.

Many regions have grand, waterborn names. Above South America lies Amazonica. I like it when a controller tells me to “contact now Rhein,” if I can see the river below. Many regions encompass vast swaths of airspace above oceans and reflect this in their names. There is Atlantico, which fences off a large sky in the central and southern Atlantic. The names Anchorage Oceanic and Anchorage Arctic are stretched over stormy, gray-and-white seas. They might be the names of ships. An enormous portion of the open Pacific is held on maps in the air-name of Oakland Oceanic, though pilots will speak to radio operators who answer to the name of San Francisco—a cross-bay rivalry drawn out over much of the Pacific. It is Oakland, though, that is the name of the sky, an ocean-straddling aerial empire whose extent might surprise the city’s residents, as might their city-sky’s borders with Manila, Ujung Pandang, Auckland, and Tahiti.

There is air over northern Cyprus that is claimed by two regions, and so we speak to two controllers, on two different radios. There is a sliver of airspace off Norway that does not lie in any sky country at all. This no-man’s-sky splits Norway’s Bodø and Russia’s Murmansk like a knife, as if it were created by some blistering of the skies since they were first charted, or in an aerial version of how new islands rise from volcanoes in the sea. Another remaining nameless realm of sky lies in the Pacific, west of the Galapagos, north of the sky land Isla da Pascua—Easter Island. These blank spots are not what we would expect to find in the realm of the airplanes more often associated with the dispelling of the world’s final mysteries of place.

In Africa the region Brazzaville answers to Brazza. The quality of radio transmissions is not always good here and it is often said twice, loudly. If you say to long-haul pilots, in a clear strong voice: “Brazza, Brazza!” they may smile and think back to the early hours of nights that passed under equatorial African stars. Two sororal skies of West Africa are perhaps the world’s most gracefully named: Dakar Terrestre, which beyond the coast falls away to Dakar Oceanique. Here is Dakar, its earth-sky and its sea-sky.

There is a majesty to the borderlands, where pilots will transfer from one set of controllers to another. Here a flight, as we say, will be
handed over,
from one place-name to the next, and so on over the world. Often one region will give us to the dominion of another a few miles before the actual border. “Call now Jeddah,” the controller will say to us, “you are released.”

—

A pilot may acquire an affectionate awareness of a kind of punctuation or asterisking of the world, composed of the names of small places, places that almost no one other than pilots will have reason to think of regularly.

Many milestones are elevated this way because they are home to a radio beacon. It’s hard not to think of older beacons, lit to help navigate, as with lighthouses, or to transmit warnings, as with the news of the sightings of the Spanish Armada, or to celebrate events such as coronations and jubilees. In the 1920s, hundreds of light beacons, often placed high on mountaintops, inaugurated the first transcontinental airmail flights, from New York to San Francisco. This cross-country trail of light echoed the railroads, of course, but also the Pony Express, as pilots and planes would change en route, allowing letters to make an almost continuous journey from one coast to the other. There was even talk of a “lighted airway” across the Atlantic for dirigibles. Today, particularly in the western United States, some of the radio beacons used by modern airliners are sited just where those original light beacons once stood.

Pilots can manually tune a beacon and see our distance and bearing from it, a basic, old-school check of our position. But in the background a modern aircraft is always searching for them, like a driver in an unfamiliar town constantly seeking landmarks and street signs. Beacons have only a certain range, and when the aircraft finds one, its codes may flicker to life on one of our screens, and in this way we come to know the names of many of the beacons of the world.

Near the tip of Cape Cod, on the ocean side, stands a beacon that is a curiosity to those walking near the beach and that shares a name, appropriately, with Marconi, the Italian engineer known as the father of radio. Beacons like this one and the plane speak to each other, like children playing Marco Polo in a pool. The plane counts the time between its call of “Marco!” and the beacon’s reply of “Polo!” and so calculates the distance between them.

In the more remote regions of the world beacons and airports often coincide; the beacon is there because the airport is there. When such a place is surrounded by nothing else that relates to aviation, its isolation lifts it into unexpected prominence in the sky. In Greenland is the airport named Aasiaat. It is on a bay I would like to visit one day, because it bears the marvelous name familiar to armchair atlas ponderers, long-haul pilots, and almost no one else: Disko Bay. The names of many small places in the far north of Canada have the quality of making bitterly cold water sound warmer than it can ever be—Pond Inlet, Sandy Bay, Hall Beach, and Coral Harbor. There are airports such as Churchill’s, in Canada, that are the only suitable runway for many miles in any direction. Often as white as paper, Churchill is habitually visited by polar bears; it stands on Hudson’s Bay, where Hudson and his son were forced off their boat in a mutiny, after the ship was freed from the ice that had immobilized it through the long winter.

Also in Canada, listed on our charts is the place called Gjoa Haven, named by Amundsen for his ship, the
Gjøa.
Amundsen was there to look for the north magnetic pole. In general terms, the closer you get to the magnetic pole, the crazier an ordinary compass becomes, as if you were approaching some fearful, caged creature. Gjoa Haven appears on our maps near the dotted lines that formally designate the Compass Unreliable Area, which is near the Compass Useless Area, further unexpected divisions of the modern sky and the world.

Some beacons are in places that although famous are geographically incidental; you might not expect them to be elevated on aviation charts in a manner so independent of their historical prominence. Point Reyes is the name of a lighthouse on the Northern California coast; a beacon near it, known by the same name, features on arrivals in San Francisco. On flights over India, we may fly over the beacon of Delhi, and like so many Taj Mahal–bound travelers below, our next stop is Agra. Robben Island, off Cape Town, where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated, was a prison even in the seventeenth century. It’s home, too, to a beacon of the same name, which appears on charts for Cape Town’s airport, and forms part of an often-used arrival pattern.

I have a Canadian friend from a small town in interior British Columbia. When I first asked where she was from, she laughed and shook her head and said I would not know it; it was a tiny town where they didn’t close the school unless the temperature was colder than minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. But when she said the name of this small place, Williams Lake, it was my turn to smile and say: I know Williams Lake; I gaze on it every few months. There’s a navigation beacon there. When I see her, if I have flown over it recently, I will tell her if it was cloudy, or if I could see her hometown resting between the Rockies and the Coast Range.

In Japan’s Ibaraki Prefecture is a place called Daigo, a town of some 20,000; foreign pilots will probably not know about its waterfall, but they may know its beacon. Hehlingen is the name of a village in Germany; it is also the name of a beacon sitting in a nearby field, a name that bounces more or less constantly around the skies between Hanover and Berlin, in a range of accents as wide as the world. There are beacons named Split Crow, near Halifax in Nova Scotia; and Old Crow in the Yukon. There is the Rome of southeastern Oregon; and Norway House, which is many flying hours from all the dwellings in Norway. There is Muddy Mountain and Uranium City; Crazy Woman and Vulcan.

The names of other beacons are more mellifluous. In Scotland I occasionally overfly Machrihanish, a coastal village from where a message was sent to my home state of Massachusetts in the early days of radio; the beacon appears in the cockpit as MAC, spelled out as “Mike Alpha Charlie” by pilots like me, who dare not try the full name in a conversation with a Scottish-accented controller.

In northern China, set in the tawny elevations of the Gobi Desert not far from the border with Mongolia or the railway that connects the two countries, is the beacon named Eren. In north-central Pakistan, on the west bank of the River Indus, is the city and beacon named Dera Ismail Khan. In Algeria is Bordj Omar Driss, bearing the identifier BOD, which a controller will pronounce as “Bravo Oscar Delta” to a pilot who does not know this small Algerian town, population around 6,000, by its actual name. Russia has many fine beacon names: I like Maksimkin Yar and Novy Vasyugan; my favorite is Naryan-Mar, a coastal town of some 20,000 inhabitants, and a welcome milepost beyond the Arctic Circle.

—

An airplane navigates through the sky along a route composed of beacons and waypoints. Waypoints are defined by geographic coordinates or their bearing and distance from a beacon, and by a name, which typically takes the form of a five-letter capitalized word—EVUKI, JETSA, SABER. The idea is that they will be pronounceable and distinct to controllers and pilots regardless of their first language. The pilot’s map of the world, and the flight computers’ too, is atomized into these waypoints. They are the smallest nuggets of aerial geography, and in some sense the only such unit that matters once you leave the runway. They are the sky’s audible currency of place.

From a plane, even a wide modern road can look as slow and old-fashioned as an ancient bridleway. The plane slides like an eye over the page, like a finger across a map, over everything the road and the drivers on it must turn to avoid—towns, mountains, lakes—features so low they appear nearly smooth from above. Waypoints, though invisible, remind us that while pilots are not nearly as constrained by the sky as drivers are by roads, neither is our path always as free as it appears.

That is not to say that a waypoint is a place like any other. Though they are often strung together in airways, we’re frequently allowed to move between two distant waypoints without overflying those that lie between; as if a driver could leave the road to tunnel directly through hills and forests before meeting it again, further along. And a waypoint, for all its extraordinary specificity, is not a single place at all. It exists at all altitudes at once. It is possible for many planes to cross the same waypoint at the same time, at different altitudes, yet each plane’s navigation computers show it at the same position. A waypoint is like the address of a skyscraper that does not specify the floor. The speed of a cruising airplane also means that we often do not get anywhere near a waypoint that is on our flight plan, because we must turn well before the waypoint if we are not to overshoot the route on the other side of it. For a sharp turn, in a strong tailwind, we may begin to turn 5 miles before the waypoint, something to imagine, that in a car you would start to turn the wheel so far before the intersection.

There is a rhythm to waypoints, which roughly matches the rhythm of the human geography below. Tourists from North America wandering the cities of Western Europe may have the sense that historically significant places occur every few dozen yards; in the sky over Europe we may cross a waypoint every minute. In contrast, over open sea, or a place such as northern Canada, we may fly forty-five minutes or more, hundreds and hundreds of miles, between waypoints. The pace of passing waypoints also roughly echoes the workload in the cockpit. Most of the waypoints crossed will come in the first and last minutes of a flight, when the plane must make many turns to move between a runway and its route, and then back again at the far end.

Pilots come to know many individual named points on the routes they fly most often. Some, such as those that are well-known entry and exit points for Atlantic Ocean crossings, feel like doors, almost, or gates—when I think of LIMRI or MALOT, off Ireland, I think of the phase of flight in which they occur, the start or the end of an oceanic crossing. The feeling is comparable to the name of a bridge that you only cross when leaving or entering a city, one to which newscasters will casually refer when talking about traffic, and you know they are speaking to those who are leaving town or planning their return.

The names of many waypoints are random; an example of that early lesson taught in linguistics that there are many more possible words—spellable, pronounceable—than there are actual words. There is an automated tool available to airspace planners that generates just such names and helps ensure that identical names are not geographically close. Many other names, however, are not random. In these we see perhaps the last realm on earth in which meaningful place names are scattered over a geography that is new to the namers, a world that is new, in this case, to everyone.