TIMES OF LONDON

21-3-2015

Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker

Charles Bremner

In the 21st century, romance does not spring to mind on the mention of air travel. The charm of the elegant airline age had ended well before the last Concorde touched down. Aviators were once heroes, but in an age of mass tourism, packed cabins and airport queues, there is no longer much glamour attached to the men — and the still small number of women — who ply the skies for a living. To modernise Cole Porter’s lyric, watching computer screens in a locked cockpit in the sky may be many people’s idea of nothing to do.

A fine antidote to that view has come from Mark Vanhoenacker, an American whose day job consists of flying around the world from the right-hand pilot’s seat of a British Airways Boeing 747. Skyfaring is not a boy’s book of derring-do, nor an exposé of the high-pressure airline life. Vanhoenacker, 40, the son of a Flemish missionary to Africa who settled in rural New England, turned his childhood love of the air into a career relatively late. He spent most of his twenties as an academic historian in London and then a Boston management consultant.

That background and a poetic sensibility have produced a 330-page ode to the wonder of flight in the tradition of the great pioneer pilot-author Antoine de Saint Exupéry and Charles Lindbergh. Pilots would add the lesser-known Ernest Gann, whose 1961 memoir, Fate is the Hunter, is still the jet-driver’s bible. Vanhoenacker, now a senior first officer with BA, does not quote the line, but the spirit of his book evokes Lindbergh’s explanation of his love of flight in The Spirit of St Louis, the memoir of his 1927 transatlantic breakthrough: “Science, freedom, beauty, adventure: what more could you ask of life?”

Like the best pilot writers, Vanhoenacker paints humanity seen from the aviator’s perch, woven together with a fascinating layman’s account of the mechanics of flight, the feat in which a 380-tonne jet can “lift people and cargo away from the ground and across the sky”. On that front, the reader is acquainted with the intricacies of the different airspeeds that are critical for lift and the varying altimeter settings that mean that airliners cruising along at 35,000 feet are usually not at that height but are higher or lower on a barometric standard that everyone shares.

We learn of the endless calculation of the impressive weight of fuel that is needed to fly big airliners. Vanhoenacker explains the floating feel of ground effect, the cushion of air that billows under aircraft in the instants before landing. He describes the awkwardness of steering the vast flying machine on the ground when you cannot see much from the cockpit. He is in love with the 747, and quotes JG Ballard as likening the first jumbo jet to the Parthenon — a fusion of “mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical worldview”.

Aerial navigation, though no longer an art with sextants and star sightings, still has an arcane side. The intersections on aerial motorways known as waypoints sometimes bear whimsical names. For instance, Aussie humour was at work when the authorities there designated an arc of three waypoints in the Tasman Sea, WALTZ, INGMA and TILDA. The opening line of the song can be found in seven waypoints off Western Australia WONSA, JOLLY, SWAGY, CAMBS, BUIYA, BYLLA and BONGS.

Even with the computer handling the controls and the crew performing rote procedures, flying remains a magical business, Vanhoenacker makes clear. Every take-off is new, every landing a homecoming, “a return from the possibility of all places to the certainty and perhaps the love of one”. Vanhoenacker invokes philosophers, music, history and his own past and family to convey the sense of discovery and disorientation that he feels crisscrossing the globe between Tokyo, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, London and the Arabian Gulf. Vanhoenacker writes of the confusion of “place-lag”, which he calls “the imaginative drag that results from our jet-age displacements over every kind of distance, from the inability of our deep old sense of place to keep up with our aeroplanes”.

Flying long haul you lose track of day and night. Pilots stick to their home time, which for London-based crew for half the year is the same as Zulu, aviation speak for GMT, the universal time which applies to all aircraft in flight in the world. Returning to the flight deck after a sleep in the Boeing’s bunk for resting crew, Vanhoenacker notes that he always wishes his colleague good morning with an ironic sense because “on a light-scrambling journey, I need a minute to be sure where it is morning and for whom — whether for me, or the passengers, or the place below us on the earth.” He never gets bored, he says. “I have never had the sense that there was any more enjoyable way to spend my working life.”

For many people, consignment to eternal jet lag might sound more nightmare than dream but Vanhoenacker sees transcendence when blurring time zones in the “engineered nobility” that are aeroplanes. “To come home from a trip to a high place and a far city, from hours over the tundra or distant oceans, is a sudden and joyful deceleration. I feel this almost physically. As the aeroplane slows on the runway, both the actual speed and the place-streaking, the self-blurring begin to end,” he writes. The scale of the long-distance journey only heightens the “simplicity of ordinary things”. That line is an echo from Saint Exupéry, who wrote that “I fly because it frees my spirit from the tyranny of insignificant things.”

Vanhoenacker chose the life of the long-haul pilot after initial years flying Airbuses out of London around Europe following a training at Kidlington aerodrome, Oxford. The distant journey is always more momentous than the short hop, more of an occasion for passengers as well as crew, he says. The parallels with the old days of seafaring are there in speeded up form. Like passing vessels, “company ships” — planes from the same airline — flash their landing lights in wordless salute when they pass one another crossing over oceans and deserts at night. When cabin crew call the flight deck, the pilots will jokingly answer with the nautical “bridge here”.

When the airliners reach the end of their long cruise and descend through the clouds, pilots will sometimes report “land ahoy” on their first sight of the ground. Flying an empty airliner at night is an eery business, like crewing a ghost ship, the author says. He misses the passengers and cabin crew.

Vanhoenacker writes of the camaraderie among crew who form a team only for the time of a flight and may have never met before but who enjoy a sense of family. “It’s likely that I have never before met any of the people with whom I am about to cross the world,” he says. “Our nametags are not worn only for passengers.”

When Vanhoenacker expounds at length on “the perfect joyfulness of flying close to clouds” he sometimes veers into the sentimental airscape of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the 1970 bestseller by Richard Bach, another eminent pilot-author. Unlike the seagull, airline pilots spend most of their time high above the weather. Their world is always filled with sunshine or night and the planet appears deserted, dominated by desert, mountains and ice, as in Greenland, Vanhoenacker’s favourite fly-over terrain.

There is one aspect of airline travel that Vanhoenacker barely mentions — the anxiety that seems to have risen among the public as flying has become far safer than ever. A passage on the primeval fear of falling might have soothed the nerves of non-aviators who worry about airliners that disappear over oceans or are blown apart by Russian missiles. The omission is barely noticeable in a book that offers a riveting practitioner’s account of a human achievement that has been rendered humdrum by its own success.