Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker is worthwhile for anyone who wants to know what it is like to be an airline pilot. The author is a first officer for British Airways who has type ratings for the Airbus A320 and the Boeing 747. The descriptions of systems seem to be technically accurate and the writing is graceful. Here’s takeoff:
But with speed comes the transition, the gathering sense that the wheels matter less, and the mechanisms that work on the air—the control surfaces on the wings and the tail—more. We feel the airplane’s dawning life in the air clearly through the controls, and with each passing second the jet’s presence on the ground becomes more incidental to how we direct its motion.
Rated pilots will find some stuff here to enjoy, e,.g.,
On sky maps of the Tasman Sea, the triangles that denote the waypoints hanging like notes on a musical staff arcing toward New Zealand are marked WALTZ, INGMA, and TILDA—a reference to Australia’s unofficial anthem, “Waltzing Matilda”—while many thousands of miles west, running north to south over hundreds of miles of Indian Ocean off Western Australia, is a lyrical sequence that begins WONSA, JOLLY, SWAGY, CAMBS, BUIYA, BYLLA, and BONGS—“Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong…”
SNUPY. Near Kansas City are the culinary waypoints BARBQ, SPICY, SMOKE, RIBBS, and BRSKT. Near Detroit is PISTN, surely for the basketball team whose name reflects the city’s heritage of industry; the skies around Detroit also feature MOTWN and WONDR (Stevie, Michigan-born) and EMINN, perhaps for the rap star.
Boston has etched a particularly intricate constellation of itself onto the ether above New England. There is PLGRM, for the region’s history; CHWDH, LBSTA, and CLAWW for its food; GLOWB and HRALD cover the city’s newspapers; while SSOXS, FENWY, BAWLL, STRKK, and OUTTT chronicle the anguishes of the city’s baseball team across the heavens. Even the region’s speech—WIKID, followed by PAHTI—seems to be mapped.
The book describes why modern aircraft are such complex and overweight messes:
Most airliners now make use of GPS. Often, it’s been added onto an airliner that was not originally designed for it. There are many such technologies—related in particular to communications, and to the avoidance of other aircraft, wind shear, and mountains—that accrete in aircraft systems as layers of progressively higher neurological functions evolve in living organisms, while older systems still twinkle in the lower-down layers.
Highly recommended, though keep in mind that I’m biased!
Related:
I wanted to like this book. I tried so hard. But I found the prose to be so ridiculously overwrought as to be unreadable.
I wanted to like it so badly that I even gave it a second chance, coming back after I finished another book, something I never, ever do.
Then I reached this part, which I swear is an absolutely verbatim paragraph describing a tour of an Airbus factory in Hamburg:
> A few minutes later we turn a corner and I see a pair of wings, as they are quietly maneuvered into position. I think of the word airborne, what this plane’s passengers will be, that these wings will hold them. The sight, though, as if lifted from some gauzily bright future of our species, is anchored by the weight of ancient or archetypal rites — the laying of a keel, the benediction of what will bear us over the world — that we hear in “Marina,” by T.S. Eliot: “The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.”
I have a place for people who write like this. Below my house.
Agree! Off topic but a lovely day in Cambridge! Here for the granddaughter at Berklee summer program.
I agree w. phik. I started to read it but I put it down because it was too boring. Even non-fiction needs a plot or something to build tension. Maybe if Vanhoenacker had crashed and survived like Sullenberger he could have given the book some structure but as it was it was just an endless series of anecdotes, each one as long and boring as a modern transatlantic flight.
Modern flying has been made too safe and routine – when you board an airliner nowadays, you pretty much assume that you are going to arrive at the other end every time – where’s the fun in that? Back in the old days you would sign up for extra life insurance at the airport each time you flew because maybe you weren’t gonna make it – a least you got a little frisson of danger. At the very least the pilot would fly you into some nice turbulence to shake you up a little. On my last flight to Madrid, I might as well have been riding the Acela or a really long escalator. The only thing that disrupted the boredom were the usual screaming babies. It felt like the only risk was whether I would catch the flu from the person sitting inches away from me with a hacking cough all night.
I used to read commercial pilot Patrick Smith‘s “Ask The Pilot” column in Salon, then bought his book, the collected columns + some short safety in flying oriented mini essays, of the same title. Guess what, they don’t work, do not hold my attention in that format… I’ve been carrying it with me on several trips, and never managed to finish it (think I’ll conveniently waylay it in some airport the next time ;-))
I also used to enjoy Joe Sharkey‘s column on business-oriented flying, his tale of being aboard the Embraer Legacy jet that collided with a Boeing 737 at 37000 feet above the Brazilian rain forest, and managed to land safely (+ the legal aftermath) is quite a read. But neither gent is doing it any more, which is too bad.
The only other writer-pilot that I know of is William Langewiesche, whose EgyptAir 990 crash investigation essay is a technical and narrative masterpiece, but I don’t think that he’s written anything especially about the joys/slash/tedium of professional flying. I read Vanhoenacker‘s parlance of pilots essay in Æon, and liked it, but apparently it represented the apogee of his writing abilities. Clearly, he’s nowhere near the prosaic level of Nevil Shute in “No Highway,” and several other of his novels with a sizable aero component (including hydrogen filled passenger airships of the 1930s, too!).
That said, have any of you perhaps come across any memoir of type “I Got My 767 Pilot’s Wings Together With Muhammad Atta,” or at least a novel written from the point of view of a pilot of a hijacked aircraft? I’d like to read one such.
Lastly, perhaps there is a lesson in this for Phil, that, while perseverance, wallet, and sitzfleisch will do for becoming a pilot, it takes talent to be a writer.