Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (29 page)

If we do meet again it may be several years later, and it is likely we won’t remember where it was we first flew together, or when, or what we talked about in the course of a long evening or two. I don’t think I’m alone in knowing the embarrassment of remembering a colleague’s face or name but nothing about their life, though there was an evening six months or years earlier when we told each other a great deal about our lives. Often I meet someone, seemingly for the first time, and then a day or two into a trip, over dinner, they tell me some memorable detail of their life—their uncle’s health problems, the pet shop their partner owns, their penchant for deep-sea fishing—and I remember that I have met them before. I remember their story but not their face. A large portion of my daily social routine is washed clean by repetition, by volume, by the simple limits of memory.

When I read a scientific article that makes some reference to the typical size of groups of prehistoric humans, the tiny community that would once have been our whole world, it’s natural to reflect on the dizzyingly enormous metropolises I visit, and also on the disconcerting ease with which aviation turns from one such city to another. But mainly I think about how as airline crews we meet, work closely together in an environment that demands a heartening and particularly pure sort of ritualized teamwork, and then we say good-bye.

—

The airline’s turning world of briefly encountered faces may appear to be a sad thing to outsiders. Certainly it is not something I would have been drawn to, had I known about it before I started to fly. But I’ve come to appreciate certain aspects of it.

Among the unforeseen advantages offered by our enormous and anonymous community, one that I like doesn’t have a name, really. It is a feeling I associate with the term
face value.
When a crew meets for the first time, we know only two things about each other: that we’ve each met the standards for our roles and that it is almost time to go. In such circumstances a natural warmth, a practical ease, is both a necessity and a regular reward. There’s no reason not to want the best from each other; it’s goodwill in the simplest sense.

There is another quality to the profession, the same gratification I occasionally found in the paper route I had as a teenager. There were many snowy subzero mornings when I would not have put it in such auspicious terms, but I occasionally felt a small, inverted pride in unrecognition, in working while the rest of the world slept; in knowing that most people would only think of me if I were late or absent. I imagine that power-plant workers, or snowplow drivers, know the same quiet pride of starting early, or finishing late, so that the rest of the world may work.

There’s also a camaraderie between the crew and the ground teams, those responsible for the vast array of tasks that are required to send an airliner on its way or to welcome it on the far side of the world. Among all these—the check-in and boarding staff, the engineers, the caterers and cleaners—there is one person that pilots work with most closely. The term for this role varies with the country, the heritage of the airline, and the specific duties—
turnaround
manager or coordinator, or
dispatcher,
are often heard. But in my corner of the industry it’s
redcap,
for the distinctive hats these staff members often wear, that I hear most often.

Among other duties, redcaps are responsible for coordinating the departure of an aircraft—the baggage loading, the fueling, the catering, the passenger boarding. Their job is to
turn
the plane, to get all 370 tons of it pointing back in the other direction as soon as possible. “I’ll get you away on time,” a redcap may say, after introducing themselves and the first half-dozen of the problems they are in the midst of solving.

Abroad, redcaps link an international organization to teams of local workers—in this sense they are like the dragomans of old empires—and far more than pilots they embody the age of globalization. Many local airport staff may not speak English, so redcaps speak the local language (or two or three local languages, in some countries), in addition to English. E-mails and conference calls connect the world in one sense; but there is nothing virtual about a 747 landing in Chicago or Accra. The baggage containers must fit; the fuel and the fresh blankets must be waiting. You cannot redial or resend; many people and things must be ready, standing in the wind and snow or the bite of the equatorial sun, waiting for the moment the jet will appear from the sky and park before them.

Redcaps are almost always in motion: up to the gate, down to the tarmac, through to the cockpit; within a few short minutes they may speak to the pilots, the flight attendants, the head office—many hours and miles away—the aircraft cleaners, and the caterers without skipping a step or beat. I am not sure I would recognize a redcap if I saw one who was not moving or whose phone was not ringing. For many years we celebrated Thanksgiving with a large group of English friends in London (an opportunity for me as host, not only to share a tradition but to adapt it, by removing the pumpkin pie that I’ve never liked and few guests knew to miss). But with only a small oven it was always a challenge to coordinate the cooking and reheating of various dishes. One particularly chaotic year, when I was just back from a night flight from Lagos and juggling half a dozen trays and taking a cigarette lighter to the feather stubs of an all-too-authentic English turkey that had not been properly plucked, it occurred to me that redcaps could do a roaring side trade in event planning, and that surely in their own homes every Christmas dinner goes off without a hitch.

—

Among pilots and flight attendants, in many ways it’s the small details of our wayfaring that bind us most tightly. Occasionally I meet a flight attendant or a pilot from my company in another context—while traveling for pleasure, say, or because they know a friend of mine. They understand that I never know what days I will be on my home continent the next month, or that there’s a chance I’ll be far away on Christmas Day, or airborne late on New Year’s Eve, unsure of when or where to hum “Auld Lang Syne.” We may also share a sense that cities are as much a place as a kind of fixed, time-bounded task, with an urban grammar all their own: “My next Cape Town is August,” or “I’ve got a Nairobi next week,” or “Are you Singaporing with us?” They understand if I accidentally use the old name for a city, such as Peking, Bombay, or Leningrad, because the three-letter airport codes—PEK, BOM, LED—are how these cities still appear to us on schedules and in nearly all in-house references; or if I speak of Tokyo as Narita, because its code is NRT, and because the small city of Narita, home to Tokyo’s out-of-town airport, is how the world’s largest conurbation is marked on our shared and peculiar world.

When I drive somewhere with a pilot friend, perhaps to explore the surroundings of a new destination, I joke about
pilot drivers,
how they (like me) may relax only when they know the next event—the next sign or turn or stop, and its approximate distance, and perhaps even the one after that, too. This attitude may come from instrument flight training, in which we are taught to be always thinking, in terms of both time and distance, about what is going to happen next. Or it may be that people with such sensibilities about life, and roads, are more likely to become pilots.

Other rewarding aspects of my job are, surprisingly, the direct result of the ever-changing roster of faces. I once flew with an older captain who asked me, at some quiet moment of our journey together, what my passion was. He meant, what do I love to do—aside from flying, which he would assume all pilots enjoy. It’s a good question to pose among a community that is liberated from the traditional constraints of geography and weekends. What, in this whole wide world, do I like best? Hiking, swimming, cooking badly, I replied.

Indeed, if you enjoy the ebb and flow of meandering conversations—in quiet moments in the sky over South Dakota or Samarkand, or at a breakfast table in Delhi—the window seat in the cockpit opens onto as many lives as it does places. The sense of foreignness around or below us, the peripatetic but communal nature of our jobs, and the pace of the turning earth, naturally lend themselves to storytelling and candor. Many pilots come to airline flying after careers in the military or in fields unrelated to aviation. The backgrounds of cabin crew are even more diverse. When I hear a colleague’s stories from a war, or of flying down tightly controlled air corridors to West Berlin, or of growing up above their father’s rural pub in Northumberland, or of a childhood in India and the time they met Tenzing Norgay in Darjeeling, or the years they passed installing cell phone systems in Mongolia, or strapping barrels of oil into a float plane and flying them through snow squalls to lonely lakeside camps in the Canadian north, I understand that my job is showing me the world in yet another way.

Such an enormous cohort of colleagues, who come from so many different places and generations and backgrounds, is a resource. This is true on a professional level, in terms of hearing different perspectives on routes, airports, and weather conditions that an individual pilot may experience only occasionally, and it’s true on a personal level, for cities, where an airline crew is a living guidebook, one that many frequent air travelers know to consult about their shared destination. Nearly all the jokes which I retell I’ve heard first from my colleagues; it is easy to picture these as the cultural memes they are, echoing out across the world along all but epidemiological lines of propagation.

There are the small kindnesses, too, of my job—purer, perhaps, because they are so often anonymous. It’s common, for example, for each crew to prepare the cockpit for the next; for a crew they may never meet. To reset the radios with the frequencies suitable for the start rather than the end of a flight; to anticipate the sun’s movements by carefully placing sun visors around the cockpits that can take hours to cool down; to dial away the last altitude setting for arrival and replace it with the first setting for departure. It’s a good start to a lonely night in the sky, to walk into an empty cockpit and find such gestures set on the metallic indifference of our technology.

—

If the atmosphere can seem antithetical to deep bonds between those who work high up in it, there are also sparks of real connection. Airline crews often fly over holidays or spend one far from home; there is a natural rapport among a crew spending Christmas in Riyadh or New Year’s in Istanbul. Once I had to fly from Britain to America as a passenger due to a family emergency. My manager had met the crew at Heathrow before departure to tell them why I was traveling and on this flight the crew—none of whom I had ever met before or since—treated me with the personal warmth I could only expect from my closest friends, as if they knew better than anyone what our jobs might lack on such nights.

Other times we are brought closer together by the blizzards, hurricanes, or floods that can disrupt an airport or a region for several days or more. In a far-off hotel, the temporary home of this most temporary community, nothing binds as tightly as the shared inability to return home.

I was in Cape Town between flights when ash from an Icelandic volcano closed the airspace over much of Europe. My colleagues and I had planned to stay in South Africa for two nights, but it would be ten days before we finally returned home, and even then we would not know we were leaving until a few hours beforehand. During those ten long days we came to joke about, and then imagine, a Europe devoid of aviation. How would we get home? The size of Africa, of the world, has never been so apparent to me as it was that week, when the mechanism that brought us across it was so precipitously withdrawn. We mused aloud about various overland routes across Africa. Whatever happened to the Cape-to-Cairo railway? Or might we ride by motorcycle up the west coast of Africa, and wash up, in our torn and dusty uniforms, as exiles in Casablanca, where we would wait for passage to Europe? Our forlorn 747 was parked patiently at Cape Town’s airport. We joked about phoning London to ask for permission to take the cabin crew up for a morning spin over Table Mountain or up along Namibia’s Skeleton Coast or perhaps over Victoria Falls.

The other copilot and I got along well. We went out several mornings on a drive, each day to somewhere new in the Western Cape. We talked about flying and about life; greeted each afternoon’s news, that the skies of Europe were still shuttered, with a wry smile and a discussion about where we might explore the next day. I haven’t flown with him since, but thanks to the far-off whims of North Atlantic volcanism he is as close a friend as any I have made at work. If we meet again in a 747 cockpit or in a restaurant in some distant metropolis in another ash-shrouded time, we will have a lot to reminisce about.

I regularly meet pilots whose families have ties that reach far back in aviation history; a father who was an engineer on the Concorde, a great-uncle who distinguished himself as a pilot in the Second World War, a grandfather who flew for some illustrious and sepia-bound predecessor of our company. Some pilots are married to another pilot or a flight attendant, and they will sometimes travel together on the same flight. I have heard of two brothers in my company who are both pilots, and two sisters. Fathers and sons fly together occasionally; I have recently heard about a captain whose daughter has joined his fleet.

I once flew with a senior captain who keeps a handwritten diary in addition to his professional logbook. When I asked him what he writes in it, he told me he writes about each trip and includes the names of his colleagues and something of their stories. Whether or not he’ll ever fly with them again, he said, he does not like to forget them entirely. He’ll be able to recall the days and faces and stories of his long career, as few other pilots will. Such a diary is so rare that it is a form of memory for both of us; I will not forget him for it, either.

I’ve never carried a diary on trips, but for my first few years as a commercial pilot I kept an old-school, cloth-bound paper logbook in which I kept the legally required record of my flights. In this heavy book I noted the dates and times of each flight, the name of the captain, the registration of the aircraft, the airports of departure and arrival, and whether the flight took place at night or during the day.