Vanhoenacker - Skyfaring: a journey with a pilot

This Is a Borzoi Book

Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Copyright 2015 Mark Vanhoenacker

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, a Penguin Random House company, London, in 2015.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

Two brief quotes are adapted from With This View, Who Needs Legroom? which appeared on NYTimes.com (March 20, 2010).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vanhoenacker, Mark.

Skyfaring : a journey with a pilot / Mark Vanhoenacker.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-385-35181-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-385-35182-9 (eBook)

1. AirplanesPilotingPopular works. 2. AeronauticsPopular works. I. Title.

TL710.V345 2015

629.132'52dc23 2014041159

eBook ISBN9780385351829

Cover photograph by Carolyn Marks Blackwood

Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

v4.1_r1

ep

For Lois and Mark, and in memory of my parents

Here, as everywhere else,

it is the same age. In cities, in settlements of mud,

light has never had epochs. Near the rusty harbor

around Port of Spain bright suburbs fade into words

Maraval, Diego Martinthe highways long as regrets,

and steeples so tiny you couldnt hear their bells,

nor the sharp exclamation of whitewashed minarets

from green villages. The lowering window resounds

over pages of earth, the canefields set in stanzas.

Skimming over an ocher swamp like a fast cloud of egrets

are nouns that find their branches as simply as birds.

It comes too fast, this shelving sense of home

canes rushing the wing, a fence; a world that still stands as

the trundling tires keep shaking and shaking the heart.

Derek Walcott

Lift

Ive been asleep in a small, windowless room, a room so dark its as if Im below the waterline of a ship. My head is near the wall. Through the wall comes the sound of steady rushing, the sense of numberless particles slipping past, as water rounds a stone in a stream, but faster and more smoothly, as if the vessel parts its medium without touch.

Im alone. Im in a blue sleeping bag, in blue pajamas that I unwrapped on Christmas morning several years ago and many thousands of miles from here. There is a gentle swell to the room, a rhythm of rolling. The wall of the room is curved; it rises and bends up over the narrow bed. It is the hull of a 747.

When someone Ive just met at a dinner or a party learns that Im a pilot, he or she often asks me about my work. These questions typically relate to a technical aspect of airplanes, or to a view or a noise encountered on a recent flight. Sometimes Im asked where I fly, and which of these cities I love best.

Three questions come up most often, in language that hardly varies. Is flying something I have always wanted to do? Have I ever seen anything up there that I cannot explain? And do I remember my first flight? I like these questions. They seem to have arrived, entirely intact, from a time before flying became ordinary and routine. They suggest that even now, when many of us so regularly leave one place on the earth and cross the high blue to another, we are not nearly as accustomed to flying as we think. These questions remind me that while airplanes have overturned many of our older sensibilities, a deeper part of our imagination lingers and still sparks in the former realm, among ancient, even atavistic, ideas of distance and place, migrations and the sky.

Flight, like any great love, is both a liberation and a return. Isak Dinesen wrote in Out of Africa: In the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space. When aviation began, it was worth watching for its own sake; it was entertainment, as it still is for many children on their early encounters with it.

Many of my friends who are pilots describe airplanes as the first thing they loved about the world. When I was a child I used to assemble model airplanes and hang them in my bedroom, under a ceiling scattered with glow-in-the-dark stars, until the day skies were hardly less busy than Heathrows, and at night the outlines of the dark jets crossed against the indoor constellations. I looked forward to each of my familys occasional airplane trips with an enthusiasm that rarely had much to do with wherever we were going. I spent most of my time at Disney World awaiting the moment we would board again the magical vessel that had brought us there.

At school nearly all my science projects were variations on an aerial theme. I made a hot-air balloon from paper, and sanded wings of balsa wood that jumped excitedly in the slipstream from a hairdryer, as simply as if it were not air but electricity that had been made to flow across them. The first phone call I ever received from someone other than a friend or relative came when I was thirteen. My mom passed me the telephone with a smile, telling me that a vice president from Boeing had asked to speak with me. He had received my letter requesting a videotape of a 747 in flight, to show as part of a science project about that airplane. He was happy to help; he wished only to know whether I wanted my 747 to fly in VHS or Betamax format.