Mark Vanhoenacker became a pilot late, after descents into academia and management consulting, but he became a pilot, steering Airbuses among the capitals of Europe, before he became a writer. In 2008, having logged more than three thousand hours in the cockpit, he published his first article, in Sanctuary, the journal of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. It was about shopping, not birds. He wrote more. He switched to 747s. Now he has eight thousand five hundred and thirty hours and forty-three minutes, and a book out, “Skyfaring.” It traverses wind, air, water, light, home, away, between, and how Mariah Carey got her name (from the gold-rush musical “Paint Your Wagon,” which features the Maria, a fictitious California gale).
Vanhoenacker flies long-haul routes for British Airways: LHR to JFK, YVR, CPT, PEK. “As if we had only pulled out of a driveway, I turned right toward Tokyo,” he writes, contemplating the way that airplane views “hint at the circuitry of more or less everything.” The other morning, he was at the airport in Geneva. It was not the parking lot of the In-N-Out Burger next to LAX—according to Vanhoenacker, one of the world’s great plane-spotting venues—but it was, nonetheless, a decent place to geek out.
“Northeasterly wind straight down the runway, eight knots. Cloud at twelve hundred feet, good visibility,” Vanhoenacker said, reciting the conditions from a window table at the airport’s café. “A thousand and eighteen is probably the most important thing—that’s the altimeter setting.”
In “Skyfaring,” he reminisces about the weekend mornings of his Massachusetts adolescence, eating doughnuts and watching “the small planes land and taxi in behind a low metal fence, the clear boundary of an airfield that many who love airplanes will have a memory of deeply wanting to cross.”
There were no crullers. Vanhoenacker ordered some muesli with red fruits. His breakfast companion, who had been enjoying the gentle intensity of his company—the Concorde doesn’t take an article in British English, he said; he was certain that left-handers were overrepresented in the pilot population; he loves the B and C gates of Heathrow’s Terminal 5; flying back from Vancouver in winter, you can see the Northern Lights almost every night; when a B.A. pilot shows up for work, his iPad must be charged to at least seventy-five per cent—was suddenly put in mind of an ancient activity of her own, going on dates in restaurants that had televisions.
“Sorry, I was distracted by my company ship sailing by there,” Vanhoenacker said, willing his glacier-blue eyes from the runway back to contact position. He’d been ogling a British Airways Airbus A319.
“So that’s Papa Foxtrot,” he said, explaining that pilots refer to a plane by the last two letters of its registration. He got out his laptop and hit a few keys. “The eighth time I flew an airliner, it was that one. April, 2003, Vienna to London.”
Vanhoenacker turned back to the runway, where the plane was slipping away from the ground, frictionless as the peel coming off a banana. “And off we go,” he cried. “Gear up!”
A pilot’s vantage corresponds to the rhythm of his workdays. Las Vegas is “sandwiches and coffee”—a snack before the start of the descent into L.A. “Geneva is coming back from a long-haul flight to London,” Vanhoenacker said. “Geneva’s breakfast. There aren’t that many short-haul flights in the sky at that hour, and as you move into an area where the day is finally catching up, as the sun comes up this separate flock of birds rises up all over Europe.”
Flying, a century after Kitty Hawk, can seem both scary and banal, the realm of underwear bombers and miniature mouthwashes, but Vanhoenacker recovers its metaphysics. “Time in airplane mode is a gift, really,” he said. “Just the way you’d go and sit in a coffee shop, you can watch the world go by.” Soaring over Belgium, where his father, a priest, grew up, moves him. “To think that it’s 2015, and all those people there that I’m related to—they have no idea that this distant relative is flying over them and staring down at their lights.”
Out on the runway, a queue was forming: a Middle East Airlines A320, bound for Beirut; a KLM 737, heading back to Amsterdam; the state aircraft of the United Arab Emirates, a private 747, half snow goose, half tapir, its snout sniffing the sky.
Vanhoenacker was flying to London as a passenger that afternoon. In the evening, he would continue to New York. Westbound, he likes to sit on the right-hand side of the plane, in a window seat. ♦
