Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (39 page)

Wings that are not expanded are
clean;
the process of expanding them may be called
dirtying up.
A helpful controller will often tell pilots to fly their minimum clean speed; they mean for us to slow down, but there is no need to be inefficient yet. The 747’s wings have seven configurations—one clean and six dirty. During the approach the expansion takes place in stages. Each stage lowers both the maximum and minimum speeds of the aircraft, and so as each stage completes we can slow down and initiate the next. The fourth of the dirty configurations is typically used for takeoff; the fifth- or sixth-dirtiest are used for landing.

The sight of our growing wings, often accompanied by a sensation of slowing that symbolizes all we must undo for our return, is one of the pleasures of flight that’s largely reserved for passengers, who not only have the time to muse on the mechanical, carefully staged undoings of our height and speed, but also have a better view of the growing wing itself. It’s worth asking, the next time you fly, for a window seat at the trailing edge of the wing, or just behind it. The pleasure of this view before landing could hardly be simpler: here are our wings, spreading for the act of return.

Such expanded wings are also one of the marvels of watching a plane land from the ground. If an airplane passes right over you before landing—perhaps in a traffic jam near an airport, or if you are inclined to have a picnic at a place where airplane lovers congregate for just this experience—the spread wing, the easily apparent nuts and bolts of the air-arms of our species, may be the most breathtaking thing about the moment; aside, of course, from the sight of something the size of a 747 in the air at all. Its huge curved flaps extended into the wind, its engines pressing against this new and self-created drag, it looks like the arriving bird it is—legs reaching forward, wings wide, poised for the moment to come.

—

I still like to look up at airplanes from the ground and to have a window seat when I fly as a passenger. Such moments remain a separate realm of experience, almost entirely distinct from the work in the cockpit. I’m generally most moved by flight not when I land an airplane myself but an hour after I’ve done so, when perhaps I’m on a freeway leaving the airport in Los Angeles and I see another airplane like mine only a few hundred feet over the ten streaming lanes of low traffic, the flash of the sunlit wings strobing over the cars. The forty-year-old me watches the landing airplane with a certain technical and aesthetic interest; the child in me can’t believe that I’ve so recently been one of the two or three people who guided an airplane in its last thunderous moments over the upturned gazes of the five-year-olds of the world.

It’s now about an hour before landing, six or seven hours before I’ll walk through that temple gate in central Tokyo. We are plotting our passage through the gates of Tokyo’s skies; we are planning how this airplane, which has climbed ever higher since we left the surface of the world near London, will descend and slow and return.

I make a few notes for my announcement to the passengers. I mouth through the words in Japanese before I speak. Near the end of
Citizen Kane,
Susan asks what time it is in New York. Eleven thirty, Kane tells her. Long-haul pilots may smile at her response: Night? Only Greenwich Mean Time is displayed in the cockpit; so as I always do, I check with a colleague to confirm my calculation of the local time at our destination. The changing language of place is reflected in the form such questions take in the cockpit. What is the time “here”? I ask, rather than “there,” though we may still be 400 miles, a day’s drive, even a time zone away from our destination. Here and there, in any case, are about to meet.

We tend to think of journeys, even air journeys, as lateral or curved endeavors, that we have moved over or around across the earth. But in the cockpit arrival has a much more vertical sensibility. At cruising altitude nearly all the world’s complicated weather is below us. During descent we enter the weather of our destination not only from the side but from above. We return to
terrain,
the generic term for the earth’s surface in the same way; we descend into the realm of mountains that may be beside us rather than below.

After we have
briefed the arrival
—the weather; our target speeds and altitudes at the various soft and hard gates, and our actions if we fail to meet these targets; the runway; our expected taxi route after landing, which is one of the more complicated parts of many arrivals—there are typically a few quiet minutes before we are given our first descent clearance.

When this clearance comes, we dial it into the autopilot, and at the appointed moment the engines roll to idle and the nose begins to drop. “Here we go,” says the captain. You might think that this phrase would come at the start of a journey, when we push back from the terminal, and that certainly such momentum-conjuring invocations might come at the moment we begin the takeoff roll. But I hear myself say: “Here we go,” most often near the end of a flight, at what’s called the
top of descent,
the point we leave the high cruise. Here we go—down into the space that is different because it is lower, down to our destination that stands beneath it all.

Because runways rarely align with the direction of a journey, an airplane makes many of its largest and most dramatic turns right after takeoff, when it is taking up its route, and not long before landing, when it leaves its route to align with the runway. Narita Airport is not far from the coast, to the northeast of Tokyo itself. On this bright morning the wind is from the north, so we make a clockwise series of turns around Narita, bringing us far to the south, over the water. This route takes us nearly over the airport, and below I see the exact spot where our airplane will reach the earth in fifteen minutes’ time; we are pleased to see that our gate is unoccupied. Such direct overflights of the runway we are due to land on are a reminder of the extremity of our speed and altitude, of our still-mighty energy. There is no pulling over on the side of the road to let someone out; the only way to get to the place directly below us is to fly away from it at several hundred miles an hour.

In the last few miles before landing, airliners may follow a radio beam projected outward and upward from the runway. Pilots—or their autopilots—want to lock onto this beam, to follow it to the runway. Airliners generally approach the beam from a side angle, and because this angle, the wind and the speed of the airplane can all vary, the aircraft’s final turn to capture the beam can be quite gentle. This morning, though, the wind is blowing us across the beam, so the autopilot reacts with a much sharper turn, to avoid the aircraft being blown through the beam and out the other side. Such a turn, the last major turn before landing, is worth watching for from the window seat. Its apparent certainty and vigor, as the airplane and pilots seize onto the course that leads to the runway and the flight’s end, is as good an image as any of both aerial freedom and of the moment it is undone.

Once I flew from Moscow to London late in the evening. Our flight had been delayed by heavy snowfall in Moscow, and when we arrived in the skies over London we were the sole remaining airplane bound for Heathrow that night. It was a flawlessly clear night over the city. Though we were still outside the M25, the ring road around London, we could already see the airport at the far side of that circle, across the city it encloses. We soon reported “visual with the runway,” though we were still more than 25 miles away. On such clear and quiet nights there’s no need to follow the beam through cloud or rain, no need for the complicated regime of speed controls that are typically applied to separate us from other inbound airliners at such normally busy airports.

“Very well,” said the controller, when we reported we were visual. The instruction he was about to issue was a rare reminder to him and us of the smaller airports that both controllers and pilots train at. “You are cleared visual approach;
free speed;
all turns toward the airfield.” It was nearly midnight when we sailed over the lights of the capital in the direction of the light carpet of the runway. And just this once I came to one of the world’s busiest airports with a sense of freedom more familiar to pilots of a former age, returning from a late sortie to land on a grass strip, edged by a string of lanterns through the newly fallen darkness.

—

Most people I take into the flight simulator are charmed more by the experience of landing than of takeoff. Although at takeoff the runway dominates the windows, the destination is the vast sky above. Our eyes are drawn upward; they follow our intention as we move, in many senses, from the specific to the general. At landing this is reversed. The whole airplane, every mile of the flight, has been aiming at this country, this city and airport, but above all at this runway, a few miles northwest of Japan’s Pacific coast.

The technologies that bring us to this point, to this sight of a city, still amaze me. We see the point from so far away. We see it, in essence, from the other side of the world, through fog and cloud and the skies of many countries; we see it not through the intervening rock but from far around the curve we will fly, from another day. Whenever I read that an example of tool use has been discovered in the natural world, some flicker of technology among another species, it suggests a continuum: from a sea otter pounding smartly with its rock to the airplanes that are guided across the world by the full light of our creations and in the last moments by our own eyes.

Some people who dislike flying specify that what concerns them is the feeling of not being in control. Another reason, I suspect, is that they cannot see their direction of travel. If it’s not normal for humans to move so fast, it’s even less natural to see only sideways while doing so. Even on a train the windows are big enough to show more of what lies ahead. Today, on a typical single-deck airliner, the cockpit occupies the position where the sides of the fuselage curve around to the nose, so it is only the pilots who can see forward. But on the double-decker 747 the cockpit is upstairs, so the two passenger seats nearest the front of the lower deck do in fact offer a partial forward view. Their two occupants will be able to see something of Japan straight ahead this morning, to watch our return to the land not only below the plane but also in front of it, to arrive here as simply as we do.

On most approaches we do not need to see the runway until the “DECIDE” call, in the last fifteen seconds or so of a flight, but usually we see it long before this, when the aircraft turns onto its final course or breaks from cloud. From far away a runway appears like a punctuation mark, a bracket tilting away along the ground. At first it looks so small, marked off as precisely and preciously from its surroundings as a painting on the wall of a museum seen from far across a room.

When I’m first able to pick out the runway from the surrounding world, I may announce: “I’ve got it.” Occasionally I hear colleagues announce: “Land ahoy,” even if we have not been over the sea at all during the flight. But this is the most apt expression; from above, the edges of the runway mark off the only useful land in all the world. A few months before this flight to Tokyo I had landed in Vancouver, in an unexpected snow squall. For much of the approach there was no horizon to be seen, only the pattern of approach and runway lights hanging in the haze and tilting gradually toward us, as if we were sailing to the floating runway of a city in the clouds.

Many airports, like Narita, have multiple runways, and then the whole complex, lifting toward us, looks like a city itself, which the largest airports practically are. Approaching an airport with parallel runways, all sensibly aligned to the wind, is like approaching a city on an interstate that is getting busier and busier and suddenly noticing a barrier with, just beyond it, another set of lanes going in the same direction. Often passengers will see other aircraft paralleling their own plane’s path, while on the wide roads below vast streams of lives and vehicles are heading toward a tower of clustering skyscrapers or to the same airport, all of us about to enter a city.

I now have a clear view of our assigned runway at Narita ahead. I remember, for an instant, the summer I came to Japan in school or the times I later flew here on business trips. I wonder who is among the passengers today, what songs they are listening to as they gaze out. “I am visual,” I say. I disconnect the autopilot and silence the whooping siren that warns me I’ve done so. We lower the landing gear just before we cross the coastline. We complete the extension of the flaps and read the landing checklist. The air is bumpier now, yet another physical sensation that, like the spreading wing and the changing tune of the engines, marches hand in hand with the growing view of return.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull found that when he flew low over the water he could fly “longer, with less effort.” Many pilots, whether or not that book inspired their choice of profession, will recognize just what he meant. When an airplane is in the final stages of the approach, a certain amount of power from the engines, paired with a certain angle of the nose, guides it down to the runway. But these settings must be slightly changed toward the end of the flight. The wing starts to produce more lift when it is near the ground, even if nothing else has changed. On the 747, I feel what is described as a
float
through the controls, a sudden resistance by the airplane to descend as willingly as before.

As the plane approaches the ground, the air beneath it can no longer move out of its way in time. So the air begins to act like a pillow. The proximity of the ground also prevents the vortices that spin off the wingtips from forming properly, which further enhances the efficiency of the wing. When an aircraft experiences this we say it is entering its own
ground effect.
The next time you see a 747 sailing over a park or a highway only moments before landing, at about the elevation of a twenty-story building, consider that this is the height at which the great restless jet begins to settle itself on the air you are breathing beneath it, a parting gift of antigravity from the sky or a welcome from the earth the airplane is coming home to.