Flying Books I

I just finished Mark Vanhoenacker’s, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot (2015). Vanhoenacker is a first officer—that is, a copilot—flying 747s on long-haul flights from London to the Far East or over the Atlantic and the U. S. to Los Angeles, or down through the Americas to São Paulo or Buenos Aires. Skyfaring describes what it’s like to fly one of these planes and more particularly, what the regular experience of such world-shrinking voyages does to his planetary view. As a pilot, he says, he is aware “that the whole world is possible.” In a late chapter called “Night” that Vanhoenacker tells us he wrote first, he reveals that he prefers to fly at night and elaborates the many strange effects of day and night an airliner encounters traveling at nearly the speed at which the edge between light and darkness moves around our planet as it turns. A 747 can spend an entire flight in the twilight of a setting or a rising sun. Its movement may prolong the night or, conversely, shorten it to less than a handful of hours. Flights near the poles can remain in daylight for their entirety or can move from alternate darknesses to the light of several dawns.

            Vanhoenacker’s literate and exact prose will awaken for air travelers impressions they never gave a name, from the look down after takeoff at “how a city becomes its own map” to the jarring feeling of being too suddenly in a different place we could not in other times have reached without a long passage; he wants to add “place lag” to the more common term associated with time and our internal clocks. Vanhoenacker quotes many poems, prose passages, and songs about flight, from W. S. Merwin to T. S. Eliot, from Leonard Cohen to Joni Mitchell, and from Marilynne Robinson to Joan Didion. But his literary frame of reference includes those who never  flew: Charlotte Brontë and Wordsworth, Coleridge, Melville, Rumi, Emerson and Cézanne.

            In a chapter titled “Machine” he compares a modern airliner’s self-regulating systems with those of living creatures. He has a light but precise touch with the technical details of flying such as inertial navigation and GPS, magnetic versus geographical North Poles with the movement of the former, and the different sorts of altitude measurement he regularly uses, from the arbitrarily-set barometer/altimeter adjustment that regularizes all high-altitude flights to the voice in the cockpit that barks out the actual distance of the plane from the ground on landing. Speed also is a quantity with several scales of measurement, different if measured in relation to the air in which an airplane moves than it is when the measured speed is movement along the ground. In jets a third scale measures movement as a fraction of the speed of sound.

            In his job, Vanhoenacker may fly with a cockpit crew he won’t see again for month or years. His fellow pilots and he are together for the hours of flight, perhaps again for a meal or two at their stopover, and when he sees one of them again after a long interval, he may forget the name but remember details of the personal life they talked about. It is an odd community, and he does not ignore the disadvantages of a life where schedules can take him away from home on any holiday or disrupt any local commitments. But he spends little time talking about such challenges or with the small fortune he had to earn as a management consultant to buy into the airline-sponsored resident pilot training program in England that eventually led to his hiring by that airline. What he emphasizes instead are the oddness and the beauty of the life he has chosen: “the joy of airliners is the particular quality of their motion over the world.”