Mark Vanhoenacker - Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

A poetic and nuanced exploration of the human experience of flight that reminds us of the full imaginative weight of our most ordinary journeysand reawakens our capacity to be amazed.

The twenty-first century has relegated airplane flighta once remarkable feat of human ingenuityto the realm of the mundane. Mark Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot who left academia and a career in the business world to pursue his childhood dream of flight, asks us to reimagine what weboth as pilots and as passengersare actually doing when we enter the world between departure and discovery. In a seamless fusion of history, politics, geography, meteorology, ecology, family, and physics, Vanhoenacker vaults across geographical and cultural boundaries; above mountains, oceans, and deserts; through snow, wind, and rain, renewing a simultaneously humbling and almost superhuman activity that affords us unparalleled perspectives on the planet we inhabit and the communities we form.

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

ep

Contents

For Lois and Mark, and in memory of my parents

Authors Note

I occasionally struggled to decide which units and terms to use in this book, as aviation itself, though otherwise so globalized, is not always consistent. For example, feet are used to measure height or altitude over most, but not all, of the worldwhether or not the metric system is used by those on the ground below. Winds are usually quoted in knotsnautical miles per hourexcept where they are quoted in meters per second. My own background as an American working in Britain didnt make things any easier. In general I have tried to use either customary U.S. units or the units most commonly used in aviation. When it comes to talking about the weightor, more precisely, the massof aircraft, though, I have stuck with the metric tons Im most familiar with at work, as a metric ton (equivalent to around 2,200 pounds) is not so different from a U.S. ton (2,000 pounds).

If you have a favorite photograph from the window seat, please send it along to me via the website Skyfaring.com . I would love to see it.

London

October 2014

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.