What It’s Really Like to Be an Airline Pilot

Mark Vanhoenacker’s new book, “Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot” (Knopf), isn’t exactly a memoir. It’s a meditation on flying, on the physical act of soaring( 1) through the air in a giant metal tube, and on the foreign-to-most experiences of the pilot behind the controls. “I am occasionally asked if I don’t find it boring, to be in the cockpit( 2) for so many hours,” he writes. “But I’ve never had the sense that there was any more enjoyable way to spend my working life; that below me existed some other kind of time for which I would exchange my hours in the sky.”

To try to understand that level of passion, I met Vanhoenacker at Kennedy Airport, where we talked, first in a terminal waiting area, then in the cockpit of one of the British Airways 747 s that he flies. We spoke about the book, the differences between being a pilot and a passenger, and what we’ve lost as flying has become a routine part of many of our lives.

DAN SALTZSTEIN: In the book, you talk about something that I think passengers will intuitively understand, which is the idea of place lag( 3). Not jet lag, not based on circadian rhythms, but disorientation based on location.

MARK VANHOENACKER: Well, place lag is the best term I could come up with( 4) for that bewilderment( 5), which is something a lot more than culture shock or jet lag. It’s something that pilots or aircrews( 6) experience more extremely than anybody else. Let’s say you start in North London and you get on the Tube( 7) and take the train out, and then you end up on a flight for 12 hours, and suddenly you’re making an approach( 8) into Singapore. It’s the next afternoon and you left London late at night and now it’s midafternoon and these great towers of clouds are rising( 9) off the Strait of Singapore and you look down and think, “This is just a whole other world.” Then you land and go through customs( 10) and immigration and suddenly you’re on a bus and off-duty( 11) for the first time in 16 hours.

You look around, and all around you it’s just a regular afternoon. People are sitting in their cars and their houses and listening to the radio, listening to news programs about events and people that are as foreign as any could be to us, and yet airplanes connect us in that way. Airplanes make that kind of motion possible. I think we probably evolved as a species to be born, to live and to die within a few dozen square miles of forest or savanna.

We will simply never be accustomed to that kind of change of place. I think in a way it’s a good thing. It’s kind of the wonder( 12) of travel and it’s something that I have not become more accustomed to. It only gets more wondrous to me, really.

(After a walk-around, in which the pilot visually inspects the exterior of the plane, we headed( 13) up to the cockpit. It felt smaller than I had expected.)

DS: Does this ever feel claustrophobic to you?

MV: No, this is a large flight deck( 14), actually, compared to other flight decks. We’ve got our bedroom there - it’s like being inside a tent( 15). It’s got a bathroom. It’s what we often call the en-suite suite.

DS: But your visibility is limited in some ways. You obviously can’t see most of the plane from here.

MV: You develop this sense of the length( 16) of the plane and the width( 17) of it. Often, an aircraft controller will say, “Plane vacating( 18) the runway( 19).” One of the things you learn when you’re training is that when we in the cockpit have left the runway, there’s 200 feet of plane behind us that is still on it. So you develop this whole kind of awareness( 20).

DS: You wrote in the book about how pilots will say the sunsets( 21) that you see from a cockpit would qualify as the best sunsets you’ve ever seen from the ground - but you’re seeing them constantly. And there are scenarios where you would not just see one long sunset but actually multiple sunsets.

MV: Yeah. When you fly from London to Tokyo, you go into the Arctic and it’s a night flight. You leave London in the afternoon and you get to( 22) Tokyo in the morning. So it’s a night flight. But the sun never goes down because in those higher latitudes it doesn’t go down at all during the summer. So you fly into that area where it’s continuous sunlight, and by the time you’re flying out of that area, it’s morning where you are. But sometimes you turn south a bit and the sun will set. Then when you climb( 23), you get higher - just a few thousand feet can make the sun rise again because you’re still getting that higher vantage point( 24) over the top of the Earth. And so, you can get three or four in the flight. It really makes you question what exactly is a day. It’s sunrise to sunset, or is it?

DS: I wonder whether flying can ever become routine for a pilot when you’re constantly reminded of that alien environment and you’re constantly reminded of the views.

MV: One of the reasons I wrote the book was to remind myself how amazing( 25) it is, the extraordinary things that we do all the time that become ordinary. When you see the Northern Lights for three hours a night a week, or see the sun setting on the Alps, or fly over Istanbul and see the gold glitter( 26) in morning light, how can you be amazed by that all the time?

I’ve gotten some emails from colleagues who’ve read the book and were happy to re-encounter that enthusiasm. Flying is a wonder for everyone. Kids( 27) are always a good reminder of what we should try to rediscover or shouldn’t get used to. Kids are amazed by airplanes.

DS: If you had to pinpoint( 28) what you feel as a pilot that you can convey( 29) to an average passenger, that they either take for granted( 30) or don’t know about the experience of flying, what would that be?

MV: I guess( 31) the sense that I was trying to capture in the book is the one I had as a child. I can’t think of an easier thing to find a sort of basic human joy( 32 )in. It’s really quite a spiritual experience, and it’s also this amazing technological achievement. A lot of pilots have those things as the two halves of their personalities. They have a romantic sensibility about the world but are also amazed by science and technology.

Flying is a very old dream of our species, and when we look out at a 747 waiting to take us halfway( 33) across the world, we’re looking at a dream come true. It maybe doesn’t feel like that because we do it so often now, but planes are literally a dream that’s come true.

GLOSSARY

1. to soar: enlairar-se

2. cockpit: cabina

3. lag: decalatge

4. to come up with: ocórrer

5. bewilderment: desconcert

6. aircrew: tripulació

7. tube: metro

8. approach: descens

9. to rise: alçar-se

10. customs: duana

11. off-duty: fora de servei

12. wonder: meravella

13. to head: dirigir-se

14. flight deck: cabina

15. tent: tenda

16. length: llargada

17. width: amplada

18. to vacate: abandonar

19. runway: pista

20. awareness: consciència

21. sunset: posta de sol

22. to get to: arribar a

23. to climb: ascendir

24. vantage point: punt d’observació

25. amazing: increïble

26. to glitter: resplendir

27. kid: nen

28. to pinpoint: precisar

29. to convey: transmetre

30. to take for granted: donar per fet

31. to guess: suposar

32. joy: joia

33. halfway: mig camí