Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot (41 page)

Rather, the deepening gratitude I feel for home relates to it as the place that, wherever I am flying, I know I will return to and be still. Home is where my sense of place can find itself most easily, where my rooted half, the one that refuses to travel at anything faster than a brisk walk, knows to wait, when he wakes up and realizes his peripatetic companion has taken the passport from the desk drawer and gone away again.

To come home from a trip to a high place and a far city, from hours over the tundra or distant oceans, is a sudden and joyful deceleration. I feel this almost physically. As the airplane slows on the runway, both the actual speed and the place streaking, the self-blurring, begin to end. And once home it is the simplicity of the ordinary things, rather than the shock of difference, that is heightened by the scale of the journey. All those miles, all those hours over ice or sand or water, to return to a snack taken from a cupboard, to a photograph on a shelf, to the closet quietly closed with the suitcase at last at rest inside. I may go out to eat with friends, comforted that they do not know what other seasons and countries I have seen since we last ate together. I like that they rarely ask where I have been, as if I have not been away at all, as if that other self had stayed at home or walked across town to be with them.

Sometimes, if I have no errands or plans, I will not leave home for a day or more after a long trip. There’s a new pleasure to the confinement of the rooms and in the weight and simplicity of the small tasks and details, a wonder they reacquire in direct proportion to the time and miles I have traveled, a quality they accrue only because I left. If a hint of place lag is experienced even on returning home, perhaps such days of self-mooring are a way to minimize further confusion, of not changing once again the place—not even to a coffee shop down the street—where I find myself.

If I go out at all, it might be to a park, where the sight of actual soil after so many earth-miles is so striking, and my slowness above it feels like a kind of miracle and another unexpected gift of the airplane’s speed—as on that flight in a small plane over England years ago, when the fighter jets passed us so quickly that our newly evident slowness suddenly became a gift. This, too, is place lag, but when it’s induced by a return home it is not an uncomfortable feeling. Until I fully inhabit my place and time again, it’s as if I can still see what my life looks like from a certain distance or altitude—an appreciation made clearer, perhaps, by listening to a song I happened to have heard while I was away. This is how the closely spaced atoms of home come to fill the horizon when I return, as simply as the whole world came to fill the cockpit windows when I left.

It hardly matters where we go, only that we’ve been away. An old friend of my parents is from Wisconsin but has lived for a long time in my native part of New England. I tell her that when I come back to New England, the hills look right, that no matter where I am, they are what I am always expecting to see standing beyond the end of every road or rising from the far shore of every lake. She laughs and says that the longer she is away, the more right Wisconsin looks when she returns to it. She flies from her hilly current home to her flat first one. She watches the land change beneath her. She lands, leaves the airport, and drives out to the farm she grew up on. Something opens, she says.

Airline crews come to know a life of motion, of transiting the physical miles between our memories or ideas of places. But this is only a more extreme version of what every air passenger experiences when they make a new journey or retrace one they—or their parents or grandparents—made long ago. Such travels are emblematic of our age: of globalization, urbanization, immigration. In such a world, time becomes indistinguishable from geography, not only in the original sense of the slow migrations of continents or of the arcs of time zones that we have drawn on the turning planet, but in the motions of our own lives and families. When that friend of my parents returns to Wisconsin, it’s unnecessary, she tells me, to even try to tease out the years she’s been away from the miles of her journey. She flies back in time.

At its best, this experience is a wonder. But the airplane gives airline crews, at least, so many places that the effect is all but permanently disconcerting. On Friday I fly over Iran, closing on the Turkish border near the salt lake of Urmia. As if in mimicry of the sky above it, the lake’s deep-blue center fades out to tan edges. On Monday I am over Utah and I blink twice at the Great Salt Lake below. The feeling you may have on the first cold day of winter, when you put on a heavy coat you have not worn in eight months and your fingers encounter a restaurant receipt in the pocket, from a meal you barely remember—there is a geographic, planetary equivalent of such a temporal or seasonal disjointedness, and I experience it almost constantly. My wallet is a library of subway cards. I find coins from Kuwait in my pocket and I cannot begin to remember when I was last there; I take out a pair of shorts from the closet at home, shake out the sand in the pockets, but I cannot name the beach. Often I cannot name the sea.

A few times it has happened that I’ve passed by the sign for a restaurant near where I grew up in Massachusetts, named for Bombay, the old name of Mumbai, and then a day or two later have flown to India, to the city itself. Later, walking the rooms of the house where Gandhi stayed, or passing the city’s famous outdoor laundry, or staring out from an auto rickshaw at the tectonics of a Mumbai traffic jam, I have thought of that restaurant in the snow not two days earlier, as bewildering as a barely remembered dream. On the rare occasions when I have not enjoyed my job, it is because I’ve felt that I am not in this place or that place; I’ve felt I am nowhere at all.

One December, however, the Bombays, the twinned Mumbais, ran in reverse. I started my day early, in the city in India, flying to London as a pilot and then on to Boston as a passenger. Then I drove west, toward the town where the families with whom I had always spent the Christmas holidays since I was born were already gathering.

Not long before I passed the Indian restaurant, as the winter night gathered over the Berkshires, the year’s first snow began to fall. The world reassembled as the place that means the most to me, as the small place that home can only be. When I saw the sign for the restaurant the thought of the various Bombays, the scatterings from the airplane’s prism, was not troubling. It was something to hold and marvel at, and then set down.

Every landing is a return from the possibility of all places to the certainty and perhaps the love of one. Many years ago I flew to Toronto as a passenger. It was an overnight flight, and the sun rose before we started our descent. It was summer, the whole window of morning was filled with blue and green, and I was listening to my music as Canada rose to meet its day. When the airplane was on its final approach, a quick shadow, moving in the distance, caught my eye. It tracked effortlessly over forests and ponds and along the lanes of the highways. Eventually I understood it was the shadow of the airplane I was in: an eclipse of the earth, made in the image of the airliner returning me to it.

I tried to imagine where the early sun must be, far above and on the other side of the craft, to throw this shadow onto the earth. I stared, rewound the song in my headphones, turned up the volume, and grabbed my camera. I had never seen this before and I thought it might soon disappear. But the shadow stayed roughly in the same place in my window. It grew in size as the world hastened under it. I realized that the airplane and its growing shadow were approaching each other. After so many parted miles they would meet again at the moment of touchdown.

Only a few times since that morning have I seen the sun and the journey’s end aligned so well that the shadow of the jet appears and trembles on the land, as if in anticipation; as if the sound of the engines or the growing form in the sky has helped the shadow to remember what first cast it. Here is land, both noun and verb. Here we are, coming home.

The shadow keeps perfect pace with the widening wings. It crosses the earth as simply as the plane, as simply as our eye, or as if it was a kind of light, the mark made on the planet by our own falling gaze.

I look out. Each time I see this growing shadow it makes me smile, and I can almost believe it’s the first time I’ve been in a plane. There it is now, I think, there it is, as I turn up my music again. Through the gap between the seat and the wall ahead of me I realize that another passenger has seen it, too. She looks back at me, points to the outside. I nod and smile. We both lean forward and turn, pressing against our seat belts, to watch.

Acknowledgments

The world of aviation is as wide and varied as the planet. In the course of researching and writing I have become only more aware that many pilots—particularly those of smaller planes, in smaller airlines, based at smaller airports, or outside Britain—will have experiences that may be very different from those typical to my corner of it, a limited realm that I have tried to describe as accurately as I can.

I would first of all like to thank all of my colleagues on the flight deck and in the cabin—and in turn, our many colleagues on the ground, without whom no flight would ever push back and upon whom our safety depends in a thousand unheralded ways—for their enthusiasm and professionalism, and for all they have taught me about airplanes and the world. I have no reason to doubt what several retired pilots have reported to me—that it’s not only the flying, but those who share our love of it, that make this the best job in the world. I am also grateful for the cadet sponsorship program in which I enrolled in 2001. Such programs open the profession to those who could not otherwise afford it and are more necessary than ever.

I would also like to thank those who first taught me how to fly—my instructors and the staff at what is now called CAE Oxford Aviation Academy. I’m very grateful to my colleagues on training course AP211—Jez, Bomber, Seb, Cat, Neil, DAVE!, Adrian, Adam, Kirsten, Chris, Balbir, Lindsay Boy, Lindsay Girl, Mo, Hailey, Carwyn, and James—for all their support (“You’ll be fine, mate!”) and friendship on the course, and since. Whenever I hear one of you on frequency, speaking to Gander Radio or Iran Air Defense or the Heathrow Director, I’m reminded how much I wish we could fly together more often. Thanks also to Simon Braithwaite for his company in Cape Town, and to Nigel Butterworth for inviting me to the cockpit on the way from Narita to Heathrow, way back when you could.

Several individuals read the entire manuscript and offered their thoughtful comments on it. I’m grateful to Mark R. Jones and Kirun Kapur (for their formative thoughts not only on the “Night” chapter, the first one I wrote, but on all the others since), Steven Hillion (who first read a complete early draft and guided many of my subsequent revisions), Desirae Scooler, Harriet Powney (whose attention to detail was a particular inspiration), Cole Stangler, Don MacGillis, Sebastien Stouffs, Douglas Wood, John Pettit, Ian Slight, Tony Cane, Mary Chamberlain, and Alex Fisher (whose knowledge of both the technology and history of aviation is like that of no one else I’ve ever met).

Various experts and colleagues offered their advice on particular chapters. I am grateful to Emma Bossom of the Royal Aeronautical Society, Richard Toomer and David Smith of the British Airline Pilots Association, Paul Tacon of the Honourable Company of Air Pilots, Marc Birtel and Shaniqua Manning Muhammad of Boeing, Mike Steer of CAE Oxford Aviation Academy, Peter Chapman-Andrews of the Royal Institute of Navigation, and Paul Danehy of the NASA Langley Research Center for putting me in touch with the following experts.

In writing the “Place” chapter, my colleague on the ground, Mark Blaxland-Kay, never tired of my questions about navigation and route planning. David Broughton, Charles Volk, Larry Vallot, Andrew Lovett, and Brian Thrussell cheerfully answered my questions about inertial navigation and magnetism. Nanda Geelvink, Brendan Kelly, Mireille Roman, and Robin Hickson offered welcome assistance on waypoint names and airspace structures.

The “Air” chapter benefited greatly from the patient technical assistance of Jennifer Inman, Matthew Inman, Andrew Lovett, Brian Thrussell, Stephen Francis (who first introduced me and my course mates to some of this material), Stuart Dawson, Eugene Morelli, and R. John Hansman. Dave Jesse and James H. Doty offered their assistance with the section on radio altimetry.

Douglas Segar gave me a great many invaluable comments and suggestions for the “Water” chapter. Jeff Kanipe, Stephen Schneider, and George Greenstein offered their kind assistance with the “Night” chapter. Their comments and evident enthusiasm for the night sky gave me a hint of my father’s regret at not becoming an astronomer.

Helen Yanacopulos, Jamie Cash, Eleanor O’Keeffe, Ulrike Dadachanji, Mark Feuerstein, Martin Fendt, Terry Kraus, Amanda Palmer, Vinod Patel, Dick Hughes, Pamela Tvrdy-Cleary, Julia Sands, Karen Marais, Chris Goater, Haldane Dodd, Anthony Concil, Mitch Preston, Drew Tagliabue, Mark P. Jones, Hilda Woolf, Mei Shibata, John Edward Huth, Tony Cane, Al Bridger, Kannan Jagannathan, and Wako Tawa offered their kind assistance with other sections of the book.