Our speed in the blue between two cities is measured in knots. Our port and starboard wingtips are marked by red and green navigation lights, arranged as upon a ship. Today in the air we still speak a nautical language - of forward and aft cabins, galleys and bulkheads manifests, rudders and trim. Our image of the Wright Brothers on the windswept Carolina coast is the best reminder of the debt every pilot owes to the sea. When, after long hours over desert or sparsely inhabited land a city appears, the water we see near it - lakes, dams, rivers locked in their rolling green frames of vegetation - looks holy as blood. It’s routine from the cockpit to see storms form in real time, and from them the fall of new rain on the roof of the ocean, or to overfly the endpoints of glaciers, where shards of the ancient snow-glass tumble into the police-light blue of northern seas.
For many miles and hours in the sky - sometimes for nearly an entire flight - water, in one state or another, is the only thing we see. At any given time, roughly two thirds of the Earth is covered in cloud. Much of the land that long-haul pilots work above is covered in snow or ice. But these first minutes over the North Sea are enough to remind me that flying offers perhaps the last thing an aspiring pilot would expect: a close experience of water.Ībout 70 percent of the world’s surface is ocean. Land, not water, will predominate on this route to Tokyo - a journey across all of Eurasia, the world’s largest land mass, bookended by the blue of two seas. From the flight deck we see the Suffolk coast directly ahead of us, a clean line of land’s end that moves steadily down the aquarium-thick panes of the windshield as we climb and accelerate. The gaze of passengers on the right side may follow the Thames as far as the North Sea. London, now, is on my side of the cockpit.
They seem to have arrived, entirely intact, from a time before flying became ordinary. 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. Three questions come up most often, in language that hardly varies. When someone I’ve just met at a dinner or a party learns that I’m a pilot, he or she often asks me about my work. In the cockpit we sense the airplane’s speed-born life to come in the air, we feel clearly that long before we leave the ground we are already flying along it, and as the lights of the runway start to alternate red and white to indicate its approaching end, as the four rivers of power that equal nearly a quarter of a million pounds of thrust unfurl over the runway behind us, I lift the nose.Īs if we are only pulling out of a driveway, I turn right, toward Tokyo. I push the four thrust levers forward for an experience that repetition hasn’t dulled: the unfurling carpet of guiding lights that say here, the voice of the controller that says now the sense, in the first seconds after the engines reach their assigned takeoff power, that this is only a curious kind of driving down an equally curious road.īut with speed comes a transition, the gathering sense that the wheels matter less and the flight controls on the wings and the tail matter more. A pleasing terminology accompanies these images of the plane’s turning limbs: tail radius and steering angle and the wingtip that swings the largest arc.Ī quarter of an hour later we reach the runway. In legal terms, a journey begins when “an aircraft moves under its own power for the purpose of flight.” In aircraft manuals, elaborate charts that recall da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” illustrate the angles and distances that the extremities of the plane sweep through as we maneuver on the ground. It’s this, air alone, that begins to spin the enormous techno-petals of the fans, faster and faster, until fuel and fire are added, and each engine wakes with a low rumble that grows to a smooth, unmistakable roar. A sudden hush falls in the cockpit as the air flow for the air-conditioning units is diverted. As we push back from our gate at Heathrow Airport we light the Boeing 747’s engines in pairs, starting with those under the starboard wing.
0 kommentar(er)
