Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (34 page)

Years later, after my mother’s death, after I have become a long-haul pilot and grown accustomed to so many hours under the night skies of far-off places, I take one of these books off the shelf. I have forgotten none of the impressions it left on me, but almost all of the details. I read again about the Pleiades and rainfall among the Indians of French Guiana; the Milky Way and its ties to the ancient route that pilgrims follow to Santiago de Compostela; I remember that once when I flew the Airbus around Europe and found myself with an extra day in Lyon, I took a train to Le Puy-en-Velay and saw cheerful backpackers walking out of the town on a Sunday morning on the first few steps of their pilgrimages. I open the note my mother left in the book. She has written that she thinks I will very much like this book about the sky. I am struck by the year at the top of the note—1992. I had just started college. It was years before I would articulate a clear wish, to her or myself, to become a pilot.

She was certainly unsurprised to hear that I came to like flying at night even more than in daylight. Of all the stories she liked to tell me as a child, stories that often used to cause me to roll my eyes, the one she told most often was about how I grumbled one bright summer afternoon: “I don’t want the sun to shine, I want the moon to shine” (the cause, or perhaps the effect, of excessive readings of
Goodnight Moon
). Like most pilots, blue has always been my favorite color—“but midnight blue!” as I’m told I used to say. She had a reverence for natural phenomena and cycles, especially for those, like that of the moon, that bind us to former ages and sensitivities toward the natural world—realms to which aviation, however unnatural it is for us to fly, so often returns us.

If you’ve ever spent the night in a dark place where you are outside for an unexpectedly long time—camping in a desert, perhaps, or walking on a dark beach—you may have been surprised to see the moon rise so brightly that you suddenly remember it is capable of casting shadows. You realize that for months or even years you have been disconnected from the moon; you have gone about your evenings without any direct consideration of it. The brightness of the moon above a cruising airliner is striking. It is more than enough to read a map by; enough to cast clean-cut shadows across the interior surfaces of the cockpit.

My mother also liked to give me calendars of the phases of the moon, though at a certain point we switched, and it was me who got her such a calendar each Christmas, from a shop in Covent Garden. I still order a moon chart every year. But it’s more a ritual than a necessity. I cannot think of another job where an awareness of the moon’s states, of the turning of months, might come so naturally and so free of the intercessions of clouds. The moon and the sun have the same apparent size to us on earth—they cover similarly sized circles of sky—a pleasing coincidence that will surprise no one who spends many hours flying, like Cupid seen by Oberon in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
“between the cold moon and the earth.”

Clouds, of course, are their own marvel after dark. If you cannot sleep at night on an airplane, choose the music you like best and turn your gaze to the window, perhaps cupping your hands so that your eyes can better adjust to the realm of the night outside. Moonlight is so bright at high altitude that clouds are as clearly divided as the moon itself into dark and light sides. Such a cloudscape, riven with contours and smoothly curving furrows, looks much like the depiction of our brains in scientific pictures: intersecting lobes of white, their very simplicity somehow a reflection of stately but otherwise unimaginable complexity.

I spend many hours in the night above the North Atlantic, when hardly anyone on the plane is awake. I like it best when we are far from land and a full moon is shining down on a deck of quicksilvered clouds that, like some great species of seabird, are born, live, and die without ever crossing the shore of a continent. The clouds on such a night are more luminous than a snowbound field, with greater texture, but without scale; monumental and silent.

Sometimes scattered cumulus clouds appear over the sea in the light of a high moon, as if called up by some nightly parallel to the process by which the afternoon sun summons their day-born siblings. Under a bright moon such clouds cast clear lines of shadow onto the water. Night is no longer the right word for such a time, for this oceanic realm that grows in the water-floored hours when all is quiet on the plane, when those awake on it may survey this divine workshop where new moonlit cities and courtly lands are spun on the water-looms and silently released from open palms, to sail and vanish over the sleeping planet.

Then there are the stars. The heavens from a dark cockpit are a breathtaking proposition and a consolation when the night is moonless. High up, the sky looks three-dimensional. For once, outer space bears at least the idea of fathoms, of depth; a sea composed of distance, shot through with ancient lights.

So many stars are visible on a moonless night that constellations can be more beautiful but also less important, drawn as they are on the sky from the earth’s surface 7 miles down, below a turbulent, humid sky through which only a fraction of heaven can penetrate. Amid such a high cacophony of starlight it’s easy to lose sight of the old constellations; easy to make your own, while the Milky Way looks for once like what it is, as it would be if all the stars were droplets of water: a drift of cloud drawn across the darkness.

The sky turns, of course, as the plane moves and the earth rotates. Stars and planets rise; they seem to twinkle both more vividly and more slowly when near the horizon. Or they may flash on and off or between entirely distinct shades with a clarity I have never seen on the ground, as pockets of air act as prisms to divide the star’s light, and different colors sweep across the dark windows of the cockpit as if from a lighthouse, or as if embodying an urgent message sent across the night to us in a code of interstellar color.

In the old days globes were made and given in pairs, a terrestrial, or earth globe, and a celestial sphere of the heavens. At night from a plane we may see ourselves as we are: sandwiched between the celestial and the terrestrial spheres, the icy ball of stars turning frictionlessly over us, a high mirror to the steady roll of the dark lands and waters and the lights of cities.

—

I once sent a slightly abstract, black-and-white satellite photograph of the earth at night to a friend. It showed sprawling expansions of city lights, connected by tendons of highway and lit river valleys. I was struck that she later referred to this image as “the star picture,” since the satellite’s camera was pointing down, not up. Occasionally, over the northern, Mediterranean side of the Sinai, between Alexandria and Gaza, I have seen many pure lights in the water, much whiter than the typical lights of ships; you would swear they were stars, if you did not know you were looking down, your gaze lost in the depth of a different firmament.

Often on flights to southern Africa a colleague and I have watched for the rise of the Southern Cross, a constellation that serves direction-seekers in the southern hemisphere much as the North Star, or Polaris, helps those in the north. A senior colleague who had come to airline flying from a career in the Royal Navy taught me how to make use of the constellation to determine our course, how not to be deceived by the False Cross nearby, which is part of the constellation Vela, meaning
sails,
a pleasing name for an assemblage of light that we see from our latter-day ship. I like to check the plane’s digital compass against the Southern Cross and to consider which I trust more, the near-perfect reliability of the airplane systems or my own imperfect readings of an older, astronomical arbiter.

Once I read some letters written by Mark Hopkins, who was partly responsible for the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. He wrote these letters on a ship sailing from New York to San Francisco, all around South America, via Cape Horn, on the sort of sea journey his railroad would relegate to history. Transfixed by the ocean, he wrote to his brother that if he had had such an experience of the sea when he was younger, he might have devoted himself to nautical adventures rather than the “pursuits on land” that would bring him his fame and fortune.

The captain on Hopkins’s ship, after determining the latitude and longitude, posted this information “where all may see and enter in their journal.” In the cockpit green digits show our longitude and latitude, much as the captain’s notice showed Hopkins the last-known position that he then copied onto his letters, an itinerant and star-sighted address as important a detail to him as the date. Hopkins also wrote about the stars at sea, which have “a serenity and bewitching loveliness in these latitudes such as I have never seen on land.” He would be amazed by the stars seen from the cockpit; amazed by the airplanes that cross above his railroad and further shrink the continent.

I am flying from London to southern Africa. We are crossing the east-to-west coastline of West Africa and the airports of Accra, Cotonou, and Lagos roll steadily onto our computer screens, while outside the window a corresponding line of light runs across the haze. We sail past, out over the darkness of the Gulf of Guinea. I give the controller a position report—the waypoint we have crossed and the time we crossed it; our altitude; the next waypoint and the estimated time we will pass it; and the position after that. “Roger,” says the controller. “Next report the equator.”

I feel a shiver of surprise; I still can’t quite believe it’s part of my job to announce that we’ve crossed into the skies of the other half of the world. I try to imagine the old days of the ocean liners, when crossing the equator, the first of our grand marks on the sphere, was still understood as momentous, how on deck, sparkling glasses would be raised.

In the cockpit the equator isn’t even marked on our screens. To know when we cross it we often joke about enacting the impractical test of watching how water goes down the drain in a sink; or, more scientifically, we can click through several pages on a computer screen to call up a readout of our current latitude and longitude. The last number of these readings are always turning, as steadily as our engines over the earth. I watch for the moment when the green digits of latitude reach zero and give way to their southern mirror, when the N turns to S as the countdown from the North Pole turns to a count-up to the South. I then call the controller. “Position equator,” I say over the static that often mars transmissions in this part of the world. “Roger roger,” replies the controller. “Good flight,” he says. “Good night.”

—

If you look into the night sky from an airplane for more than a few minutes—from the cockpit or from a window—you may well see a shooting star. From the cockpit I may see a dozen during a flight, without particularly looking for them; my eye catches something, I look, smile, and say to myself: There’s another one. I don’t even mention most of them to a colleague; another will be along soon enough.

When we pass local midnight—when we cross the halfway point on the far, dark side of the night ring, heading east toward dawn—the shooting stars grow markedly more numerous, because the sky above us now faces the direction of the earth’s orbital motion around the sun, sweeping up more meteors that turn to light and run across the sky like windswept drops of water over the thick panes of the cockpit windows. I see so many shooting stars that I find it hard to think of new wishes to cast into the night, and so I have settled on a standard one that I feel can bear such astral recycling. It is more a rhetorical flourish now than a wish, a private reaction like an unspoken, sky-prompted
Bon appétit
or
Gesundheit,
that perhaps every pilot has.

One winter night, before I became a pilot, I sat in a window seat on the left side of the plane for a flight from Chicago to Boston. It was bitterly cold in both cities. Throughout the cabin the other passengers—mostly businesspeople like myself—were working quietly on laptops or flipping through financial newspapers. About halfway through the flight, I looked out of the window and saw—though I’d never seen them before—what could only be the northern lights. I checked with one of the flight attendants, who had seen them, too, and was watching from the window in the forward door. A few minutes later one of the pilots came out to stretch his legs. He told me he was nearing the end of a long career in aviation, and this night’s display was the finest he had seen so far south in the world.

I returned to my seat and peered through the smudged plastic pane. This was in the time when computers would play vivid graphical animations to accompany music, and my first thought was that the display resembled nothing so much as such a screen saver. Soon, though, the snowy earth began to resemble an older world, a deep stage rather than a screen, surrounded by layers of thick curtains of shimmering blue-green light, changing and turning only just perceptibly. I had seen pictures of the northern lights before that night but—as with still photographs taken of the earth from airplanes—the pictures miss so much when they miss the motion. The slow transformations in shape and brightness were like those of milk poured into a glass of iced coffee or dye landing in water.

This is how light can move in the night, above and to the north of our traffic jams and laundry baskets and dentist appointments. In the winter darkness the auroras are clouds of light, from beneath which wisps of illumination drift away, like falling rain driven sideways on the wind. Even in summer, on overnight flights when the crown of the world may never get completely dark, the northern lights may dance to the south, in the darkness of lower latitudes; in this way the auroras bleed across the sky, fading above us into twilight. It makes perfect sense to me that couples flock to hotels in Alaska with the aim of conceiving under this auspicious luminance.

That night, though, despite the pilot making an announcement and the crew dimming the lights, most passengers immediately turned their reading lights on and returned to their papers or laptops, with the world-weariness of travelers who have already had a long day and whose next long day is approaching all too quickly. Many did not look at all. Only a few closed their computers and pressed their faces to the window, to watch the solar wind wash over the lines of magnetism pouring from the top of our home planet. Soon the aircraft began its descent over the forests of western New England and the auroras flickered away to nothing.