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

the tundra where almost no one lives. The entire population of Canada is smaller than that of greater Tokyo, and nearly all Canadians live in a narrow strip along their country’s southern border. Siberia alone is larger than the entire United States, larger even than Canada; but Siberia has fewer inhabitants than Spain. Northeast Greenland has an area comparable to the combined size of Japan and France, and a population of forty. Many hot places, too, appear similarly desolate. We forget, unless we cross it as often as long-haul pilots do, that the Sahara isn’t much smaller than the United States; then there are the vast, barely inhabited portions of Australia, a continent comparable in breadth to the contiguous United States (as Australian postcards that overlay maps of the two make so clear); and then there is the Kalahari, and Arabia.
    I don’t mean to suggest that the portions of the earth that look empty have not been disturbed—nearly all of them have been, not least by climate change, to which the planes that carry us over such places make a growing contribution—or that we can make useful assessments of our impact on the environment from casual aerial observations. Only a specialist can look down on a brown autumn landscape of Canada or Finland, for example, and say where the snow would likely have fallen by this date a hundred years ago.

    But if you have ever hiked or driven through a very rural area or a nature reserve, and looked closely at the many lesser peaks that surround one well-known mountain, and speculated on whether anyone has ever stood on them, or even whether some have ever been given a name, then that is exactly the feeling I often have while looking out from the window seat of a long-haul airliner. In all contradiction to what we know about our negative influences on the world, so often from above it’s disturbingly easy to imagine that we are the first to look upon the earth, that we are seeking a level place to set down our ship.
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    The author J. G. Ballard wrote that “civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical worldview were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747.” Those who fly often may naturally acquire the worldview, inaugurated by the 747, that takes a planet to be a reasonably sized thing.
    I’ve come to measure out countries in jet time. Algeria surprised me, when I first started to fly across Africa. North to south it is nearly a two-hour country and I now feel what I did not then know, that it is the largest country in Africa. Norway, too, was another surprise, on routes to Japan that give us this country from end to Norwegian end; in the north of a continent crowded with smallish countries it is a fully two-hour land. France at the angles I most often cross it is a land of around one hour, as are the states of Texas and Montana. Belgium, with a healthy tailwind, is a fifteen-minute country. On many routes Russia is a seven-hour country, though really it’s best imagined as a day-long or night-long land.
    I often fly over tiny, windswept Heligoland, an island in the German Bight of the North Sea; there is an important beacon there that many pilots will know. Britain once swapped its Heligoland for Germany’s Zanzibar, off East Africa. Pilots may swap cities, countries, continents just as nonchalantly. I might give a colleague a Johannesburg on Monday for their Los Angeles on Tuesday, or exchange a Lagos for a Kuwait. Some crew find their body clocks prefer one time direction over another, and so they will say that they “do better east” or “do better west” and may ask to swap with a colleague of an opposite-pointing disposition. I generally prefer west to east, though I’m still occasionally surprised to hear myself talking about cardinal directions as if they were brands of breakfast cereal.

    I might eat dinner with a member of the cabin crew at a Belgian restaurant in