Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (59 page)

Like many people who fly often, I have watched dozens of windowless airfreighters lumbering by on taxiways and have wondered at their cargos. In the years after that accident I puzzled over them everywhere — in Quito, in Beijing, in Nairobi, in Frankfurt, in Edmonton. What could warrant such an endless fleet of machines so sophisticated and expensive? It must be more than plasma and vaccines they haul, materials desperately needed; more than cut flowers, gold, and fruit, things highly valued or perishable. Could it be simply the objects people most desire? A fresh strawberry on a winter morning in Toronto?

Watching pallets go aboard on monotonously similar tarmacs around the world, I became more and more curious. I wanted to know what the world craved. I wanted a clarifying annotation of the rag-doll scatter of cattle.

At 2:00
A.M
. one night last December, I climbed aboard a 747 freighter in Chicago to begin a series of flights around the world with freight.
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I would fly in and out of cities like Taipei, Rotterdam, and Los Angeles with drill pipe, pistol targets, frozen ostrich meat, lace teddies, dog food, digital tape machines, pythons, and ball caps; with tangerines from Johannesburg, gold bullion from the Argentine, and orchid clusters from Bangkok. During the hourless penetration of space between continents, I would sidle among the eighty or more tons of airborne freight on the main deck, examining disparate labels like an inquiring bird. Out cockpit windows, I would become absorbed in the sprawling stillness of the earth.

Before I boarded the first flight, however, I wanted to examine the plane.

The assembly building at Boeing’s aircraft plant at Everett, Washington, is so large — ninety-eight acres under a single roof more than a hundred feet above the ground — that it is said to have its own weather. Sometimes low clouds form in steelwork near the ceiling, where gantry cranes carrying subassembled sections of 747s, 767s, and 777s glide toward final assembly sites. Over a single November night I watched swing-shift and third-shift crews at the plant complete the assembly of a 747–400 freighter, nearly the largest plane ever to fly. I studied it, and listened and touched, as its 68,000-pound wings were joined to a fuselage section, the six fuselage sections slid together, and landing gear attached beneath, leaving it to tower above its workers, empty as a cathedral, aloof as the moon.

When I was a boy I raised tumbler pigeons, a breed that at some height above the ground destroys its aerodynamic lift and comes plummeting down like a leathered stone, only to pullout at the very last moment in a terrifying demonstration of power and grace. Model airplanes hung by black thread from the ceiling of my bedroom; I was mesmerized by the wind, seething in eucalyptus trees around our house; once I jumped from the roof with an open umbrella.

At seventeen I entered college as an aeronautical engineer, only to discover that it was the metaphors of flight, not its mechanics, that moved me. I was less interested in engineering than in the imagination of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who wrote of the “tender muslin of the meadows, the rich tweed of the woods,” who climbed into the open cockpit of a Sahara-bound mail plane with his tool bag and heavy clothes like a deep-sea diver. I switched to Arts and Letters, but the marvel of flight never diminished for me, and the exotic allure of the earth continued to tug. I pictured the skies as a landscape of winds — West Africa’s harmattan, Greece’s damp Apeliotes, California’s Santa Ana, Japan’s Daiboufu (“the wind that knocks horses down”).

That night in the Boeing assembly building I admired what I saw come tangibly together: a staggering achievement in engineering, metallurgy, and economy of design. The physical assembly of a 747–400 freighter — 232 feet long, 165 tons poised over eighteen tires like a barefoot gymnast on a balance beam, a six-story drop from the apex of its tail — suggests the assembly of a chronometer by tweezer, a sculptor’s meaning with a jeweler’s fastidiousness. Standing on scaffolding inside a wheel well, I marveled at a set of brass-colored steel screws securing hydraulic lines in a pattern as neat as a musical staff. Not a tool mark, not a misstep was to be seen. (Elsewhere, workers were buffing the plane’s aluminum skin to remove scratches I couldn’t find with the pad of my finger.) Fuselage sections came together smooth as a cap sliding onto a French fountain pen.

For twelve or thirteen hours that night I watched, wandering off occasionally to sift through a box of buttonhead rivets (three million of the plane’s six million parts are fasteners), or to observe agile men disappearing into the recesses of another 747’s unfinished wing, or to heft “nuclear hardened” cable — flexible, shielded conduit that carries thick bundles of color-coded wire from the controls on the flight deck to each engine. Then I circled back to the freighter — this particular 747–400 being built for Singapore Airlines — with another bit of understanding, a new appreciation of its elegance. People who saw the 747’s first flight, in 1969, were impressed that something so huge could fly. What surprised the pilots were its nimbleness, its fluid response to their foot and hand controls, and the easy way the aircraft absorbed turbulence.

The Boeing 747 is the one airplane every national airline strives to include in its fleet as confirmation of its place in modem commerce, and it’s tempting to see it as the ultimate embodiment of what our age stands for. Superficially, it represents an apotheosis in structural engineering, the applied use of exotic metals and plastics. Its avionics and electronics systems incorporate all the speed and efficiency of modem communications, and in terms of manufacturing and large-scale corporate organization, the swift assembly of its millions of parts is a model of streamlining and integration. In action, the object itself is a virtuoso solution to flight, to Icarus’s dream of escape and freedom. It operates with as little regard for geography, weather, political boundaries, intimidating physical distance, and time as anything humans have ever devised. If the sophistication of the plane’s mechanics was beyond my understanding, the spare grace of its lines was not, nor its ability to navigate and to communicate over any quarter of the planet’s surface in almost any sort of weather. (The plane’s only enemy, I was told, is rogue winds — the inevitable riptides and flash floods of the troposphere.)

When I measured out the freighter’s nearly completed main deck that night — sixty-eight paces down the bare interior — I was thinking of the quintessential symbol of another era: the Gothic cathedral of twelfth-century Europe, and of its emptiness, which we once filled with religious belief. Standing on the main deck, over the stub that joins the wing roots, where “nave” meets “transept,” and looking up toward the pilots’ “chancel,” I recalled the intention behind Lucio Costa’s Brasilia, a fresh city, aligned east and west like a cathedral but laid out in the shape of an airplane. But there in the hangar, the issue of spirituality, as serious a consideration as blood in the veins of a people, was too vague. The machine was magnificent, beautiful as staggered light on water, complex as an insoluble murmur of quadratic equations. But what, placed with in it, could compare to religious faith?

In the assembly building that night, the 747 came together so quickly that to be away even for half an hour meant missing lines in a sketch that soon became a painting. I would stand in one place, then another amid the cocoon of jigs, cradles, floor jacks, elevated walkways, and web slings surrounding the plane, watching while teams of men, some with ponytails and tattoos, polished off a task neat as a snap of dry fingers in slow motion. They were glad for the work. They knew it could disappear in a trice, depending on the banks, the market, or a lone securities trader in Singapore.
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An aircraft will give away some of its character to a slow walkabout. If you stare nose-on at a 747, you can tell whether the plane is fueled by the angle at which the wings sag. This vertical flexibility partly explains the sensation of unperturbed agility one feels as a passenger. If you let your eye run to the tip of either wing, you can see another key: a slight horizontal twist apparent in the last thirty feet or so — an engineer’s quick, intuitive solution to damping a troublesome oscillation. A similar intuition once compelled Wilbur Wright to warp the leading edge of the wing on an experimental glider, lending it critical lateral stability. The glider metamorphosed into Flyer, in which, on December 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hills on the North Carolina coast, Orville Wright achieved powered, sustained, controllable flight for the first time.

That flight carried him about half the length of a 747–400 freighter’s main deck. He was airborne for twelve seconds in a craft stripped of all excess weight. The plane I was standing under can carry 122 tons 50,000 nautical miles in ten hours. The Wrights had little inkling of commercial advantage; the 747 freighter, with out the support of government subsidies for initial research and development, with out the promise of private profit, with out corporations competing fiercely for a share in the marketplace, with out a continuous turnover in all that is considered fashionable in consumer goods, might very easily have gotten no further than a draftsman’s table.

Yet my last impression of the plane, the rainy morning I drove away from the assembly building, was of accomplishment. Whatever people might do with it, however they might fill this empty vessel, it gleamed, to my way of thinking, as an ideal. It was an exquisite reification of the desire for beauty.

Sometime later, I returned to Everett to inspect the finished cockpit. I wanted to crawl into every space that would admit me: low, tight bays on either side of the nosewheel doghouse that hold tiers of maintenance computers; the trans-verse avionics bay aft of them, where the plane’s triple-redundant inertial navigation system and flight-deck computers are located (and from where, through separate hatches, one can either drop to the tarmac below or emerge on the main deck above). I wanted to orient myself among banks of Halon bottles (the firefighting system) and emergency oxygen tanks on the lower cargo deck. I wanted to enter the compartment aft of the rear pressure bulkhead and see the massive jackscrew that tilts the horizontal stabilizer (the fins that protrude from a plane’s tail).

Once the plane was fitted with its four Pratt & Whitney engines — each developing up to 56,000 pounds of thrust (about 21,000 horsepower) — Singapore Airlines would take it away. At something like $155 million, it was an enormous capital investment. But with an international airfreight market currently expanding at about three times the rate of the passenger market, Boeing’s plane number RR835 would soon pay for itself. After which, grossing upward of $750,000 per load against an operating cost of roughly $15,000 per hour, it would begin to earn its owners a substantial and unencumbered return.

After the Frankfurt airport and London’s Heathrow, Amsterdam’s Schiphol International Airport is Europe’s largest airfreight depot site. KLM’s operation at Schiphol is efficient and organized — dangerous goods here, live animals there, valuables (jewelry, currency, silver bars, uncut gemstones) over here, drugs in yet another place. In this world, “perishable” refers to more than flowers, food, and newspapers; it includes everything in tenuous fashion: watches, video games, shades of lipstick, a cut of trouser — objects for which a few days’ head start on store shelves is crucial.

On an upper half-floor of the cavernous out-bound-freight building — the main floor includes an open space perhaps 600 by 200 feet and 40 feet high — there is no one, only automated loading equipment, enslaved by a computerized sorting program that is updated continuously in response to aircraft schedule changes and new delivery priorities. The loaders, moving on floor tracks, pull standard-size pallets and cargo containers from steel shelves at just the right moment to launch them on paths terminating promptly at the cargo doors of their intended airplane. It is stark, bloodless work. On the main floor the tedium is relieved in three ways: in the buildup of single pallets, where workers arrange many small packages trimly in eight-by-ten-foot-square loads, at heights to fit either the upper or lower deck of a particular aircraft, and with one top edge rounded slightly to conform to the curve of the plane’s sidewall; by the loading of oddly shaped or remarkable objects — a matched set of four dark blue Porsche 911s, a prefabricated California ranch-style home; and by the sheer variety of goods — bins of chilled horse meat, Persian carpets, diplomatic mail bound in sisal twine and sealed with red wax, bear testicles, museum art exhibitions, cases of explosives.

The impression one gets amid the tiers of briefly stored cargo and whizzing forklifts is of mirthless haste. A polite but impatient rectitude about the importance of commerce prevails, and it forestalls simple questions: Have they run out of mechanical pencils in Houston? Is the need for eelpout in Osaka now excruciating? Are there no more shirtmakers in Dakar?

The following day I departed the freezing rain and spitting snow of Amsterdam for Cape Town, 6,000 miles and an opposing season to the south, where one of KLM’s smallest facilities operates on a decidedly different scale. We bring, among other things, eight white ear-tufted marmosets and two Goeldi’s marmosets, both endangered, inbound from South America for a local attraction called Monkey Den.

When my escort completed our tour — a semi-enclosed metal shed, no automation — he very kindly suggested that we go for a drive. He felt harried by shippers’ phone calls, cajoling for more space than he could provide on the out-bound flight. I, too, wanted to get away from the clamor.

For the past six days I had been flying a heavy schedule, mostly in and out of the Far East. I was bewildered by the speed with which everything moved, by how quickly we came and went through the countries. In a few hours my plane would turn around and fly back to Johannesburg, pick up fresh flowers, hunting trophies, and raw diamonds, then return to Amsterdam.

We drove west through windblown sand scrub on the Cape Flats, rather quickly through Cape Town itself, and around to Clifton Bay on the west side of Table Mountain. The weather had been hot, but it was cooler now, seventy-two, with a brisk southeast wind, the one they call the Doctor.