Up in the air
We’ve all been there. Clear morning, quiet terminal. You’re a little early to your gate, and you’re watching the ground crew do their thing. Rationally, you know this works. It always works. But somewhere deep inside, there’s that small, primal part of you. It sees those tiny people working on that giant, manmade, metal bird. “There’s no way in hell,” it whispers, “something that big gets off the ground.” And yet every day, around the world, thousands do.
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to make that happen, if you’re curious about how it might feel to be the agent of such marvelous feats, land yourself a copy of Mark Van- hoenacker’s gorgeous and captivating new book, “Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot.”
Loosely structured as an actual voyage — the first chapter is “Lift,” the last, “Return” — “Skyfaring” artfully demystifies the fascinating technical aspects of commercial flight while delivering poetic insights straight from the cockpit. “The grace of flight,” Vanhoenacker writes, “of movement unsupported by water or
wheels, by rock or grass or anything sensible at all, is the simplest explanation for its long reign as a symbol for transcendence.”
Flying, “Skyfaring” explains, can bestow typical, terrestrial things with profound appeal. “In music, comedy, science, we respond to the revealing of relationships we did not see at first, or did not expect to find so pleasing,” writes Vanhoenacker, a British Airways pilot. He believes that something similar happens when you see a familiar place, especially your hometown, from the sky. “We know the song but not like this,” he writes; “we have never met this person and yet we have never in our lives been strangers.”
Legroom may be diminishing throughout the airline industry, but the author points out that flight always affords us at least one luxury: time away from our hyper-connected, incessantly engaged world. Soaring along at 30,000 feet, we inevitably get a few of those “increasingly rare quiet hours in which there is nowhere we have to go and nothing we have to do, hours in which we are alone with our thoughts and music and the moving picture of our journeys.”
Throughout the book, the author points out several aeronautic ironies. For instance, a 747, which is too heavy to stand on many of the world’s runways, can be turned during flight with a dial that’s “roughly the size of a dime.” To pilots, the world “looks fastest just before landing, when the airplane is slowest.” And although it may be called “air travel,” the actual experience is awfully “cut off from any direct physical encounter” with the element itself.
Vanhoenacker also brings airplanes to life. “Airliners have skins that like any skin serve to regulate what passes through,” the author writes; “they have circulatory systems; they maintain a self-regulating, all but biological level of homeostasis.” He clearly explains how inertial navigation systems, which comprise an accelerometer and a sophisticated gyroscope, let airplanes intuitively “know” where they are without the help of satellites, radio signals or any other external influence.
Later, he shows us how pilots can use “wind heat” — which occurs as air compresses against a surface and heats up — to warm fuel that’s too cold during flight. Like the human body, it seems, the simplest way to heat up a plane’s blood supply is to move it a little faster.
Vanhoenacker, a columnist for Slate who con- tributes to the New York Times, worked in management consulting before he started flying, mostly because he thought that “something [he] wanted so much could never be practical, almost by definition.” But the book suggests that the urge to become a pilot, perhaps like the urge to paint or make music or write fiction, might be something you’re born with. “Many of my friends who are pilots,” the author writes, “describe airplanes as the first thing they loved about the world.”
The profession isn’t without drawbacks. All the coming and going, the author says, makes “many kinds of connections” impossible. There’s also the prevailing sense of disorientation pilots and crew members can feel after a relentless series of long-haul flights. “Somewhere in my lower-brain consciousness, I am the most obvious answer to the question of what these places, separated not by an inconceivable distance but by mere hours, have in common,” Vanhoenacker writes. “And that makes no sense at all.”
But despite all that, “Skyfaring” makes it seem, and Vanhoenacker clearly feels, as if there’s no better job in the world. “One of the best reasons to become a pilot, especially if you are from a cold and often cloudy place, is the chance to surface from the world of clouds,” he writes, “to know that sunlight will be present on nearly every day of your working life.”