Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (27 page)

Sometimes you see a line of blue cut straight through such a cloud of ice on the sea, and you follow it with your eye, certain that so true a course must end in the shining steel of something man-made—an icebreaker, surely? Yet the blue trail concludes not with a ship but with a large iceberg. So much of an iceberg’s volume is underwater that the winds that gather and guide the streaming puzzle pieces of sea ice may barely move the berg that parts this surface flow; and so the iceberg slices or casts a kind of ice shadow of open blue water behind it, a jarring exhibit of the superficial, cut cleanly by depth.

I’ve heard many pilots say that their best-loved sight in all the world is Greenland, which long-haul pilots overfly regularly on routes from Europe to western North America. We reach this most dramatic of coasts three or so hours into a flight between Europe and western North America. The overcast skies of Scotland and Iceland have usually cleared; indeed, the clouds often vanish just as we approach Greenland’s eastern, all-but-vertical shore.

On our screens, on our
terrain display,
the snowy mountains of the Greenlandic coast grow in digital splendor not long before they appear in the window, rising from the ocean like a skyline approached from across a harbor.

The ocean waters that run up to these hundred coastal Switzerlands may be sheet-white, frozen solid, or a liquid, neon blue. Amid the sea ice, or alone in the open blue, are white constellations of newborn icebergs. I like to imagine what we are too high to hear: the thunder of icebergs calving from the glacier’s flowing edge; the rolling roar of the new icebergs’ sudden overturning; the steady drip of melt from overhanging edges onto the sea, the unlikely percussion of the rain that falls more heavily in sunlight. Some icebergs are so vertically dramatic that even from a cruising airliner you can see their rising shape, and they are tall enough to shadow themselves; the fraction of them in the air alone is enough to remind us that
berg
means mountain. Hours later, sitting quietly at a desk by the open window of a warm and sunset-lit California hotel room, confounded by the memory of the ordinary lunch I ate over Greenland, I may look up the names attached to the world I cannot quite believe I overflew:
fast ice, second-year ice
and
tide cracks; nilas, ice keels
and
polynyas;
the settlements known as Ilulissat, Upernavik, Thule.

We will never see the water gyre of the planet as clearly as we do from above Greenland. Sometimes the skies are clear over the glaciers flowing through the coastal mountains, while low cloud lies over the open water where the glacier ends and we see only a continuity of white streaming down the fjord, which along some blurred line transitions from a river of ice to a river of cloud. Further in on the inland ice we see the sapphire eyes of melt pools that run out to rivers the color of the sky. If the skies are clear over the ocean, too, then we see icebergs beginning their journeys across the blue that will be their end, and no end at all.

Though Greenland has the form of a bowl of mountains, often we see little of the rock rim itself. Here at the edge of the bowl the Platonic angles of the cloud-swirled peaks are nearly pure folded snow, so much snow and so little rock that we perceive the land only as degrees of light, as a planetary drawing class on advanced techniques of shading; as crumpled pages of white earth smoldering in incendiary sunlight. And this is all, really, that the eye demands of a mountain: white shadowing white, the snow’s idea of height, gracing the twinned voltaic blues of the sky, and the ice-clouded sea. We say we love the sight of this place, this land above all others; yet all we see is water.

Encounters

I’m in my midtwenties, on a business trip for my consulting company; there are several years to go yet before I’ll become a pilot. The first plane ride I can remember was a family trip to Belgium, when I was seven. Now I’m further than ever, it seems, from that wide-eyed boy: I have a laptop and a stack of freshly printed business cards, in different languages on each side, and a garment bag filled with the suits I’ll need on this long journey away from my office.

I can’t decide whether to ask if I can visit the cockpit. From childhood through my college days, I regularly asked to do so. But since starting work, I’ve made such requests much less often. Partly it’s because my colleagues and I often have to work on the plane, or we try our best to sleep before the meetings that are waiting for us in the morning after we land. Perhaps I also fear that my eagerness about airplanes might come off as unworldly or unprofessional.

Still, this business trip is special to me. It’s part of a journey that I’ve pondered for weeks in advance, poring over an atlas in the apartment I share in Boston. I will think of this trip for years to come, whenever I see an image of the earth from space or encounter a photograph of my bedroom as a child that includes the globe I owned then. The journey I’m on runs from Boston to Japan, where I will stay for several weeks, then on to Europe, and finally back to New England. I’m flying around the world.

The industry I work in, management consulting, is known for asking candidates for employment questions to which they probably will not know the answer, in order to see how they reason their way to a sensible guess. “How many trees are there in Canada?” is such a question, and one that in subsequent years I will have no shortage of time to ponder during flights over that country’s boreal forest. In my own interview I was asked to estimate the number of violins in America, so I thought about how many violinists there were in my school, a figure I then tried to scale up to the country. Once, when I myself conducted such an interview, I asked a candidate to estimate the percentage of the world’s population that had ever been on an airplane (roughly 80 percent of the U.S. and UK populations have flown at least once; worldwide, there are no statistics, but I suspect the portion of humanity that has flown is well under 20 percent—the percentage, incidentally, of Americans who had flown in 1965).

Another such question might be how many people, in all of human history, have traveled around the planet? This elemental motion, from home back around to home, returning without turning, remains rare among even the most seasoned air travelers—rare among even pilots.

Now I am flying the long middle leg of this journey, between Tokyo and London, on a 747. Before we boarded I could not hide my excitement. Even last night on a high floor of a hotel in the Shinjuku area of the city, when I looked out at the darkening sky over the lightscape of a city that is like no other, it was London as much as Tokyo that was on my mind; twelve hours in the air, 6,000 miles, from one island nation’s great metropolis across nearly all of Asia and Europe to another’s.

We’ve been flying for maybe five hours now. The world outside is entirely white. Land, not cloud, I think, but I can’t be sure. We’re somewhere over Siberia. I have never been over Siberia, and most of the other passengers are sleeping, their blinds closed against a day they won’t even think about beginning to end until hours after we land in London. The next time one of the flight attendants passes me, I close my laptop and ask if it might be possible to visit the cockpit. She returns a few minutes later. Come with me, she says with a smile. I follow her upstairs. It’s the first time I’ve ever been in the cockpit of a 747; it’s the first time I’ve ever been upstairs on an airplane. I would not believe it if anyone told me that not so many years later I would fly this very plane between these same two cities.

The flight attendant introduces me to the pilots, who invite me to sit down. One of the copilots asks me about my work, but I’m much more interested in talking about his. He describes the challenges of long Siberian flights. He points out the magenta string of our route, arcing up to the top of a navigation screen. He shows me weather reports that print like receipts from the center console, enumerating the all but otherworldly temperatures of some of the Russian cities we are flying near. He talks with a combination of amazement, amusement, and acceptance about the peculiarities of the days and nights of a pilot’s life—the oddly casual sense of going to Tokyo for the weekend; the challenges of managing rest before, during, and after such a journey; the vagaries of light, the twenty-four hours everyone on this plane will have between dawn and dusk, a dilation of our shared day over a fair portion of the earth’s landmass. The captain shows me the printout of his schedule, folded and stored inside his cap, a tradition I’ll adopt myself years later. The codes and times on this sheet tell him that a week from now he’ll be in Cape Town, then Sydney ten days after that. Twenty minutes or so later, aware that my enthusiasm might lead me to overstay my welcome, I reluctantly thank them and excuse myself.

I return to my seat, work a little more on a presentation, gaze out the window, doze. A few hours later another flight attendant comes to my seat. I’ve been invited, she says, to return to the cockpit for the landing at Heathrow. Would I like to go? I am out of my seat before she finishes the question.

I’m given a headset. As we speak a city rises in the windows above the computer screens, its miniaturized perfection turning steadily on the drum of the sea. I point to it. That’s Copenhagen, on the Sound, the Øresund, the pilot says, smiling and making a slash in the air, between Denmark and Sweden. I try to remember the name of the place on the coast near the city where Isak Dinesen was born and died. Copenhagen is a city the copilot recognizes by sight; a city that means he is almost home to England. Here in the cockpit I first see the world as a place where the miles between Copenhagen and London are all but an afterthought, the endpapers to a day of work in the sky over Eurasia—a place where an entire city shines up, its name and situation on the planet read as easily as the sign for a highway exit after a long drive.

The captain points out the arc of the Frisian Islands, off the north coast of the Netherlands, and I remember one of my favorite books as a teenager, that contained brief histories and sample texts for hundreds of languages. The entry for Frisian, a language I had not heard of until I read this book, described how closely related it is to English. I hear a controller tell the pilots to “call now London.” As if the plane is tracing the progression of language as closely as the waypoints that form the route—as if to see and hear this from above was the only purpose of airplanes and radios—the voice of an English controller soon begins to direct our descent.

I have never before sat in an airliner’s cockpit for landing. Much of what I experience this afternoon will continue to amaze me for years to come, even after I am myself a pilot: the dramatic siren when the autopilot is disconnected—for the now-obvious reason that it should never disconnect without the pilot knowing—and another auditory marvel, those voices of the plane that crisply announce our heights as the runway approaches. At 200 feet, fifteen seconds above Britain: “DECIDE.”

Even more striking than the autopilot and the voices are the earlier portions of the descent. I see, for the first time from the inside of a cockpit, something of the nature of airliners, something that I first began to understand from that Saudi plane I watched as it parked at JFK so many years ago. I see what a 747 has done to a hazy and half-remembered morning in Tokyo: suddenly we are among the scattered afternoon clouds that were below us; they are billowing past and over us until London is recalled from beneath them. I have loved flying for as long as I can remember, and yet until today I didn’t even know what it is to be a pilot, that a job existed in which the sight of a city could grace a day so simply.

Four years later, I’ve become a pilot. I am walking in the airport in Los Angeles, about to fly to London as a passenger. Suddenly I spot the copilot who was so kind to me on that flight from Tokyo, who went out of his way to show me something I will remember for the rest of my life. I call out, say hello, and explain from where I think I remember him. After a moment of hesitation he recalls our previous meeting. We speak for some time. He congratulates me for having joined his profession and company in the years since we last met. Then, for the second time, he flies me to London.

Three years later I am in a bar outside Tokyo, or perhaps a café in Beijing or Singapore. I see him and say hello. I have now just started to fly the 747, which he still flies. In this sense my journey feels more complete than at our previous meeting. We talk for a few minutes, then say good-bye. When we next meet it will be at a 
churrascaria
in São Paulo, several years later again. We share a meal together, an amiable chat, then bid each other farewell, until some other year and city.

If my connection with this colleague is so memorable, it’s in part because it began with the first landing I ever watched from the cockpit of an airliner. But it’s also because such an ongoing personal bond, although to outsiders it may sound like hardly a bond at all, is relatively usual. If aviation overturns our locally grown senses of time and place, it changes our sense of community as well. For many who work in this business of connecting people and places, the nature of our work means that many kinds of connections are not possible, while other friendships are valuable precisely because they are so rare, attenuated over both time and the fullness of the planet.