Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker Read Free Book Online Page A

constitute it: Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg. The Ruhr is easy to see from the sky at night, a sprawling illumination as clear as any colorings in a childhood atlas.

    Before I became a pilot I had the naive sense—a feeling, as opposed to what I’d been taught to the contrary—that most people lived in a world that looked something like where I grew up: small towns, forests, fields, four seasons, hills in some recurring, familiar pattern, the reference of a coastline a few hours away, and the vague gravity of a major metropolis at some similar distance. Today I understand in a direct and visual sense what I learned in school, that humanity is concentrated in a dense set of the lower latitudes of the northern hemisphere, and further in a dense set of longitudes in the eastern hemisphere; and what I have read since school, that ours is an age of cities—small ones as well as the conurbations like Mumbai, Beijing, and São Paulo that dominate the urban earth—in which for the first time a majority of humanity lives.
    A plane’s center of gravity is a critical piece of information that pilots receive before takeoff; it depends on the weight and location on the aircraft of the passengers, cargo, and fuel. Methodologies vary, but several calculations place humanity’s center of gravity, the geographical midpoint of the world’s population, in or near the far north of India. I often fly not very far south of there, either approaching Delhi itself or passing it en route to southeast Asia. I imagine a bull’s-eye of concentric rings that begins at the center of gravity and echoes out, each ripple eventually sweeping up more and more of the planet’s population, and then I am reminded that I, like nearly everyone I know, am from the provinces, from the periphery of the map when the map is weighted by individual lives. When I fly between New York and London it is easy to forget that only in an economic sense are even these cities much more than outer stars in the galaxy of human geography, and that the place I myself have been centered—rural New England—is almost comically tangential, not even a footnote in the textbook a visitor from another planet might write about the geography of our species. The question of how the world looks to most people is one I would have got entirely wrong before I became a pilot.

    A separate question is what the surface of the earth typically looks like. If someone had asked me this before I became a pilot, my answer would inevitably and provincially have focused on what I had seen of the earth in the places where I had lived or traveled—trees, rolling hills, small towns between big cities. Today I would answer that question differently. I would say that the world looks mostly uninhabited.
    Most of the earth’s surface is water, of course, and an enormous portion of what isn’t water is very sparsely populated—whether because it is too hot, too cold, too dry, or too high. We forget this, if we ever even learned it, because we never see it—unless, of course, we look out the window of airliners, at the vast, nearly empty regions that planes bear witness to, and carry us over, the in-between places that are such obvious features of our planet’s face but that by definition we are unlikely otherwise to experience. By one estimate, the portion of the earth’s surface on which an unclothed human could survive for twenty-four hours is about 15 percent. That’s a hard calculation to make—it depends on the season and weather, for example—but from the cockpit of a long-haul airliner, at least, such a figure does not surprise me.

    The shock of a nearly empty world is most startling on routes that take us into the far north, where so much of the planet’s emptiest land hides in plain sight. Over Canada and Russia, the world’s two largest countries, are many hours of flying where you see almost exclusively snow and ice, or their brief seasonal absence; this is the taiga, the forest, and