Flying remains among the most miraculous manifestations of humans’ capacity to evolve beyond the impossible, and it all happened in the nano-moment of the last 100 years or so. Yet within one lifetime, flying for most people in the developed world has become an unpleasantness to be endured, the price of getting someplace else quickly and, these days, with a great deal of assurance that the return to earth will be a safe arrival. The pilots who fly these aerial crowd conveyances are not immune to this disaffection, this blindness to the wonders of lifting 400 tons off the earth’s crust and returning it to the clutches of gravity thousands of miles away.
Plenty of pilots retain the awe, though, and a minuscule few of their number have the gift of conveying what fuels the wonder. Mark Vanhoenacker, who earns his living from the lofty perch of British Airways 747s, is that rare breed of pilot who can write about his craft in a style so compelling it lifts the blinkers. Consider, for example, his take on the mundane process of being deposited in a metropolis on the other side of the globe:
“It is right that our first hours in a city feel wrong, or at least bewildering, in a way we can’t quite specify. We are not built for speed, certainly not for this speed. When we cross the world, some lower portion of our brains cannot understand what has, we might say, taken place. I can say matter-of-factly to myself: ‘I flew from home to Hong Kong. Clearly, this is Hong Kong: the destination signs on the fronts of the buses, the rivers of pedestrians, the surface of the harbor where the lights of so many boats race over the heaving, blurred reflections of skyscrapers.’ Equally, I know that a day or two ago I was at home. I have the everyday memories, the receipts to prove it. Yet, just as with two disparate times from my own past, I am the connection between these wildly different places across 6,000 miles of intervening continent. 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. And that makes no sense at all.”
Don’t look for an easy read here. Many passages you’ll want to reread for full absorption. Vanhoenacker tackles the perplexing, the inexplicable, the stuff that’s so obvious it doesn’t warrant a second thought. He applies his prism to something as mundane as an overcast:
“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; to know that sunlight will be present on nearly every day of your working life. An overcast sky now appears different to me on the mornings of the days I am going to fly, because I know I will soon be on the other side, that the clouds, a backdrop of one low scene, are only a curtain drawn over a brighter and more elementary one.”
Vanhoenacker started his career at the airline flying Airbus A320-series short-haulers before progressing to the 747-400. His fondness for the original jumbo jet shines through frequently, and one passage in particular is worth reading here in its entirety because it captures his skill at crafting prose that appeals to aviation’s professionals as well as the unenlightened seeking to know more about the profession.
“Occasionally one airplane catches the imagination of pilots and cabin crew, or even of the general public. More than a few colleagues told me they decided to learn to fly only because they wished to fly the 747. I am never surprised when a colleague’s e-mail address contains some version of those famous numbers. I occasionally go to an exercise class near the hotel I stay in at Vancouver–exercise is sometimes the best antidote to long-haul travel, whether because it resets the body’s clock or only tires you out into sleeping better, I do not know–and the instructor will often sing out, at the start of a pose in which we are lying on our stomachs but lifting all our limbs: ‘Lift your arms, lift your shoulders, like a 747 taking off.’
“Recently I was taxiing a 747 past a portion of the tarmac at San Francisco that was closed off for reconstruction. More than a dozen airport workers, though presumably already accustomed to the sight of airplanes at close range, nevertheless put down their tools to photograph us. On one summer evening when I was flying near sunset over the Netherlands a different aircraft type passed over us, and the other pilot let out an aerial catcall to our 747, a low whistle over the radio, then: ‘I hope you have a lovely day on that lovely aircraft.’
“Partisans often say that the 747 jet ‘just looks right.’ I agree, but this isn’t necessarily what you’d think of a plane with such an unnatural bump (a design that moved the cockpit upward and back, to permit an up-swinging cargo door to be fitted to the nose). The lines of the 747 may be so satisfying not despite this nose bump but because of it. Perhaps it recalls a natural relationship–that of the head of a bird, a swan perhaps, to a long body and wide wings. Joseph Sutter, the 747’s lead designer, was drawn to birds as a child–eagles, hawks, ospreys. He might be pleased to know that his achievement has come full circle, that a writer on the wildlife of Virginia has described the great blue heron as the ‘747 of the swamp.’”…
“The best proof that the temperature outside is really as polar as the cockpit gauges indicate is the floor of the cockpit. It can be like ice. Some aircraft have foot heaters and some do not. When I flew Airbus jets that were not equipped with them–my understanding is that they are an optional extra, like those a car salesman might offer to throw in during the last minutes of negotiations–I would sometimes wear heavy socks for unusually long flights. I would be in a hotel in Bucharest, in the baking heat of a continental summer, thinking of the sphere of cold above even the warmest times and places as I pulled ski socks onto my feet. The 747 has foot heaters. The frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean looks better–everything looks better–when your feet are warm.”
