As we started down the runway at Heathrow, the engines and the wings of the 747 transformed the air – the air that is so transparent and insensible as we breathe and walk through it – into power and speed and lift, so flawlessly that after only a brief roll down what is little more than a very straight and peculiarly well-lit road, it was time to pull back on the control column.
One of the great technical and poetic achievements of our species, but in the moment itself it is just this simple: I pull up, and we begin to fly. As we lift off, the captain announces "Positive Rate" – we are climbing.
"Gear up," I reply, and the 18 wheels retract, the doors close over them, as the form of the aircraft is smoothed to its purpose.
Then I turn the control column right, south, toward Cape Town. We climb up and turn toward a distant season; we climb up into the ocean of air and bank the great 747, with its decks and rudder, its port and starboard, forward and aft, its log and library of aeronautical charts, toward a city whose history swings over waters from a hinge of rock at the end of continent – a continent whose very beginning, in the form of the first lights on Morocco’s west African coast, we will not see until after we have had dinner.
Our first milestone after take-off is the navigation beacon marked SAM in the sober font of our charts, and in small glowing green letters in the corners of the cockpit screens before me. SAM’s frequency is 113.35 MHz, broadcast upwards to any sky-vessel that cares to navigate toward it. SAM is the beacon for Southampton, the city from which the old Union-Castle liners once took up their sea routes to the Cape. We cross this beacon just 10 minutes into a journey of more than 11 hours; after just 50 nautical miles of the more than 5,500 the 747 will cover tonight.
As we cross the beacon, the needles that indicate its position swing round. Like London, it’s now behind us, and we’re still climbing over the ribs of cloud that line the Channel, up into the sunset that has not yet finished.
We are underway.
One of the questions I’m often asked when people find out I’m a pilot is whether flying is something I’ve always wanted to do.
At first, I found this a curious question. It’s not one that I was often asked when I worked in the academic or business world.
And yet the longer I fly, the more sense this question seems to make. I think it comes from a deep place; from the memory our collective dream of flight. I’ve come to think of it as not really a question about what I’ve always wanted to do, so much as an articulation or affirmation of what we’ve always wanted to do.
Neil Armstrong, whom I once had the great honour of flying from Munich to Heathrow, took pieces of the Wright Brothers’ aircraft to the moon with him. Think of that – the relics loaded onto a rocket ship: a shard of wood from a propeller, and a swatch of cloth cut from one of our first wings. The fact is that each aeroplane we see or fly on represents not much less than a dream come true. To me, that dream explains why flying is one of the easiest and most natural things in the world to love.
It’s children, of course, whose wonder at aeroplanes is most obvious and fresh. And so with flight, as with so many things, we should take our cue from them. Watch their eyes when they visit the cockpit (and we love to have visitors before or after a flight – just ask your cabin crew) or when they pause in the terminal, staring out of the floor-to-ceiling windows. They see the shiny, waiting vessels for just what they are. And whenever I see such a child I wonder if he or she is one of the ones who already have "the bug", as we say; if they’re one of the kids who will someday find themselves proud to spend the days of their working lives in the sky, solemnly dedicated to making flight as safe as it is amazing. Today, of course, we fly much faster, higher and farther than the early romantics of flight, such as Saint-Exupéry, ever did fly (or could fly). The speeds, altitudes and distances of the jet age are so casually enormous that to many travellers they are essentially abstractions.
But these enormous abstractions of height and distance are remarkable in their own way and they are the farthest things from meaningless. For example, flying low over a farm is exhilarating. But what are we to make of a view of a thousand or more farms, from high above the amber waves of the American Midwest? We can make many things of it – but not nothing.
We certainly lose a certain perspective when we fly too high to easily make out the details of Hadrian’s Wall. But let’s consider what we gain when we can see from the Irish to the North Sea almost without turning our heads. These views, beyond the technological reach of early aviators, are today yours.
There is another unsung attribute of the high-fast-far nature of modern flight. Let’s call it the imaginative power of such motions: the mix of what you can see for yourself, and how you experience a journey in your mind and heart.
The next time you are at an airport, watch a big plane park. Watch it creep forward inch by inch toward its gate, its careful, awkward manoeuvring entirely incongruous with the globe-spanning distances it has just navigated at such inconceivable speed.
Imagine the distances – geographic, cultural, and historical – that such a jet has vaulted in the hours before it parked just a few feet away from you, on a flight as unremarkable as my last from London to Cape Town.
We took a slightly westerly route, to catch more favourable winds. After Southampton comes Lisbon, then Essaouira on Morocco’s coast, and Agadir between the sea and the foothills of the Atlas Mountains. We talk to controllers who in shorthand identify themselves as Casa: Casablanca.
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After Agadir, the great jet at last turns inland, and soon enters the sky-country, the "flight information region", known as Dakar, followed by Niamey. One controller below us answers to the call sign Nouakchott-Mauritania. We fly toward and turn over a beacon abbreviated to OG: this is Ouagadougou, where perhaps the last gusts of the winter’s Harmattan are blowing Saharan dust over the dim whorls of the city lights, which shine up to anyone on the jet who wishes to look. Then it’s the beacon ACC, Accra, and near it we leave the African mainland behind. We sail out over the water, and there are no other aircraft anywhere around us. We navigate around a line of thunderstorms as long as Belgium.
We are instructed by a controller to report the Equator. The steady countdown of our latitude from London reaches zero and then starts to tick upwards to Cape Town. The Southern Cross rises on the icefield of stars above. We may calculate south from it and then check our work against the flight computers. Unseen to our left, to the east, pass simple, blue circles on our navigation screen that represents not the names of great cities so evocative to armchair travellers and Atlas-ponderers everywhere, but airports, strips of concrete big enough for a 747, articulated in a special set of airport codes not even the most frequent fliers will encounter. We pass the blue circles marked in this geo-poetry as FCBB, FNLU, FYWH: Brazzaville, Luanda, Windhoek. Soon, the sky begins to lighten. We are off the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, approaching the sky-country known as Johannesburg Oceanic, and then soon after, at last, we call the controllers who answer to the name of Cape Town.
The sun and the western coastline of South Africa rise roughly in tandem. I am eating my full English breakfast. The captain, the other first officer and I are briefing for our arrival. All three of us are drinking tea. Soon, we initiate what we programmed last night in London, on the other side of the planet: our descent toward Cape Town. Today, the wind is from the north, so we head to the south of the airport, before turning back to land. We land pointing back to the city we flew from, back toward the long miles we flew all through the previous night.
As we approach the coastline, we see low, windswept cloud over the entire metropolitan area. Table Mountain and the peaks of the Cape Peninsula rise above this mist, which the wind sweeps around them as simply as water separates around stones in a stream.
On the navigation screen, flickering needles point to the nearest beacon, off to our left under the snow-white cloudscape: not Southampton, which was yesterday, but RIV, 117.6 MHz, Robben Island. To our right are Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope.
A few moments later we are over False Bay, and the controllers clear us for our final approach. Soon we’re racing over the surface of the cloud, and then we’re immersed in it, and it’s as if every window has been covered by perfectly trimmed sheets of white paper.
We lower the landing gear as we follow a radio beam that drills up through the clouds from the runway. A few minutes before touchdown, we see the first approach lights running ahead of us, and absolutely nothing else, and for a moment it is as if we are coming to land in a city in the clouds. Then we descend below the cloud ceiling, into the clear, and the visibility is instantaneously, remarkably good. And this, we don’t have time to think, is Africa below us, the continent that will soon begin to spin and warm the wheels that have been stowed, cooling, since take-off from London.
An hour after touchdown, we are on a bus in rush-hour traffic, heading to our hotel and our waiting beds, where I close my eyes, not quite able to believe what we’ve just done. All around is the awakening city, going on just as it would if we had never come; commuters, schoolchildren, businesspeople, on what for all we know might be the most ordinary morning in all of Cape Town’s history. It was all going on, as London’s morning presumably is now. This may be the great lesson of aeroplanes: that the whole world – everywhere – is going on at once.
Not long before that journey to Cape Town I flew to Riyadh. We flew over Albania, Crete, Cairo. We talked to controllers who answered to Zagreb and Jeddah. In Riyadh, on the road back to the airport, you see signs for Makkah, Mecca, and you simply cannot believe they mean that Mecca; the real one. We lift off from an Arabian night and seven hours later we are crossing over pre-dawn London and an hour after that I’m on the M25 and I see signs for Watford. Far less than a day, but enough time in the jet age to hold both Mecca and Hertfordshire.
Like the distance to a star or the volume of an ocean, the dimensions of utterly routine flights remain literally and alluringly inconceivable. As passengers, it’s a good reason to stare out the window; it is a great reason to close our eyes occasionally and ponder the full imaginative weight of what it means to journey on such a scale. When we open our eyes again, we may see the plane itself anew. The lines of early aircraft have their charms, but to me there is nothing as beautiful as the wing of a modern airliner. It’s a visual perfection drawn by a century of air and ingenuity. On your next flight, watch the wing tips on take-off. As the plane accelerates on the ground, the wing tips start to flex and rise. They work more with each faster moment. They are stealing weight – your weight – from the wheels. All along its length the wing is gathering upwards long before the plane rises; but the tips, where the wing’s labour vanishes into the wind that has summoned it, rise the most. Think of this: on many planes, a line drawn between the wing tips in flight would pass well above the fuselage, which hangs in their bow. Wings literally soar. They pull us up.
Today we don’t fly simply for the sake of flying. Today we fly to visit natural wonders, or to trade across the world, or to share ideas (I’m regularly struck by the fact that in the internet age, conferences seem to be getting more, not less important to so many professions), or to be reunited with our families. And such purposeful, firmly directed journeys could never themselves be the destination.
And yet – the things we see en route, of places we may never set foot. All four of my mother’s grandparents were born in Lithuania. I have never visited the country, but I fly over it occasionally. My mother died after I became a pilot, but before she could come on a flight with me. Today, I would tell her that one dark morning last year, westbound from Beijing to Heathrow, I flew over Lithuania, and saw the lights of the highways from inland Vilnius run toward the Baltic coast, or that one night, eastbound to Singapore a few months back, I saw the moonlight ripple like a smile over the great reservoir to the east of the lights of the city of Kaunas, where my mother’s grandparents came from; that I looked in to see names on the chart, Palanga, Klaipeda, Siauliai – that matched the lights turning below.
My great-grandparents would not have expected this, that one of their descendants would return in this most unlikely way, that in another century I would look down on one night-hour of their country, as if in the lights I might see the lines of a country’s palm, that we inherit as ordinarily as everything else. For many travellers, such romantic views – of journeys and wings and nameless countries of cloud, of ancestries and highways and night cities glowing in the space beneath us — are no longer what we think of when we awaken on a flight and casually raise the window blind/shade. But that oval window has the power to remind us of exactly what we are doing when we fly, and to conjure experiences, clear-eyed and beautiful, that revolve around nothing less than our world itself.
"Skyfaring" by Mark Vanhoenacker (Chatto & Windus, £16.99) is out now
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