New View

There's less time for chitchat once our official pre-flight briefing starts. The structured, more formal, interactions continue as we make our way through the terminal to our Boeing 747-400, complete our preparations for departure, push back and start those four mighty Rolls-Royce engines, and then taxi out, take off and climb to our initial cruising altitude.

Inevitably, though, on every 10- or 12-hour flight, once the route has been checked, and the winds and temperatures aloft have been uploaded, and the radio is quiet, and the "heavy" crew (the extra pilots carried for long-range services) are resting, there comes the time when one pilot will turn to the other and ask something along the lines of, "So, how did you get here?"

Many colleagues flew in the military before they switched to commercial flying. They tell stories of challenging missions and understated heroism---tales from a world in which deciding not to depart is rarely an option. Others worked for years at small airfields I've never heard of, or flew helicopters to rigs swaying in the winter maelstrom of the North Sea, or operated medical or supply flights across the shimmering heat of the Outback or the frigid wastes of the Yukon. In comparison, my journey to the cockpit of a 747 wasn't particularly remarkable. But, if it's at all unusual, it's because I came to flying later than most.

Since I was a small child I've been in love with airplanes, and commercial airliners, in particular. My parents indulged this passion, taking me to airshows and airports, and buying me the books and models that filled the shelves and the skies of my bedroom. In particular, I remember the day my dad drove me to a cargo warehouse near JFK---a three-hour drive from our home in western Massachusetts---to pick up a box of model airplane kits that an uncle in Belgium had sent me, which for some reason had been impounded by customs.

Still, I rarely considered actually becoming an airline pilot. If you'd asked me at age 10 or so what I'd like to be when I grew up, I'd have certainly answered, "A pilot!" But it seemed no more likely than my becoming an astronaut. We didn't know any pilots in my family or neighborhood. My parents thought of aviation as an interest, not a career, as it had been for my dad, who loved airplanes all his life, but never learned to fly. Similarly, at the guidance office in my high school, aviation wasn't on the radar. The counselors sent graduating seniors to college, technical training or local jobs. They didn't have any experience of sending them to the sky.

So I went, I suppose, to where I was expected to go: to college, and then graduate school. And yet through all those years doing what I thought I was supposed to be doing, I was thinking about airplanes. One day I visited the cockpit of an Airbus jet routing over Istanbul, and met a first officer not much older than myself. After I'd told him about my long-standing interest in aviation, he said perhaps I thought of flying as he did, and that for him it was the best job in the world. Soon after, I decided to quit my graduate program.

In order to save money for flying lessons, I got a job with a management and IT consultancy in Boston, who started sending me abroad for projects. One day, as I packed my suits and laptop for a journey to Asia, I realized that rather than the professional opportunity, or the chance to spend some time sightseeing in Japan, it was the thought of flying that most lifted my spirits as I packed: an MD-80 from Boston to DFW, where I'd board an MD-11---a plane on which I'd never flown before---that would take me clear across the Pacific to Osaka's shiny new airport.

Soon afterwards I heard about an ab initio pilot training program with British Airways, one of the two airlines, along with Pan Am, with the history, fleet and network that had most fascinated me growing up. I applied, and was rejected, but the woman who interviewed me phoned me afterwards to give me feedback, and to encourage me to apply again the following year.

I spent the year studying as much as I could, and practicing interviews with friends. I applied again, and this time I was accepted. All I could think of was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory---how this was my Golden Ticket to the sky. I started my training in late spring 2001, at a flight school north of Oxford, England, that sent us to the Phoenix area for our VFR flying.

In 2003, I completed my training course and joined the airline's enormous Airbus fleet as a first officer, flying A319s, A320s and eventually A321s on shorthaul routes all around Europe. Then, in late 2007, I started my training on the plane that still turns me back into a wide-eyed, cynicism-free five-year-old every time I see one parked behind the glass windows of the terminal, or roaring over a highway in the last seconds of a journey from the far side of the world: the Boeing 747-400.

I often wish that I had started my flying career a decade or so earlier. For one thing, seniority is everything in the airline business---it dictates which airplane I fly, where, and whether I'm home for the weekend, not to mention Christmas. And, as I get older (I'm 41 now), I find myself looking backward as much as forward, and thinking about the importance of being able to count off the years in terms of the personal and professional satisfaction they bring. If I'd started flying earlier, I'd have spent more years doing work I truly love.

On the other hand, all those earlier years were an opportunity to watch the world of flying---to look up at the contrails of high-flying jets, or out at the sky or the turning earth from the window seat of an airliner, or across a hotel lobby at the smartly attired airline crews, laughing and joking as they checked in to the hotel that I, a business traveler, was also staying at---and to dream about how happy I would be to someday be a part of it.

A reader of my book recently shared with me, via Twitter, an article in a Toronto newspaper by a man named Alan Eugeni, who left a successful business career in his 40s and is now an airline pilot. "I knew I had to backtrack and make good on that boy's dream---my dream," he wrote. "Was it too late? Was I too old? Was I just plain crazy? It didn't matter. I knew that I had to make a go of it or forever regret it." Plain crazy or plane crazy, I know just what he means.

In the cockpit, as we exchange stories about how we got to where we are, we occasionally detour into the story of a specific flight, one that perhaps illustrates why we so love our job. In the future, I'll aim to share some of these stories, and to write about the aspects of my job that still amaze me, and to answer, too, as best I can, your specific questions about my particular corner of the aviation world (you can reach me at mark@skyfaring.com).

Meanwhile, in the best tradition of a cockpit chat, I'll close with a story that took place very recently, after takeoff from Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport (a great name that echoes everything that's nautical about the aeronautical). Bound for Heathrow Airport, we were planned for a more southerly routing than usual across the U.S. and the Atlantic, and for the first time in my life, we took a left-hand SID from PHX, from runway 26, that brought us around to the northeast of the airport. The left-hand VOR was hard-tuned to PXR. The flight management computer was auto-tuning the right-hand VOR, and the letters IWA suddenly appeared on the bottom-right corner of the navigation display.

"I know that VOR," I thought, though I hadn't thought of it in years. I looked out the cockpit window and saw what I knew as Williams Gateway Airport when I started my VFR training there in 2001 (today it's known as Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport). In fact, the airfield's beacon, IWA, is probably the first VOR I ever tuned. And the airport is where I first soloed, and first flew at night, and spent three of the happiest months of my life, adding new friends and a long-missing vertical dimension to my world.

As our 747 raced over the lights of Phoenix and Mesa, climbing quickly into the cold January night, I saw the lights of a small plane moving down one of the runways at my old airport, hardly brighter than a star, and accelerating, it seemed, for takeoff.

It might have been a new pilot, lifting off on his or her first night solo, or a seasoned pro shooting circuits. Someone who flies simply to see their home from above, or to look down on clouds; someone who wants to become an airline pilot, or someone who has no desire to go above 10,000 feet, certain that all the real fun is to be had lower down.

A moment later, a controller cleared us to a distant downroute waypoint, and the airport I had known so well as a new pilot disappeared under the clean line of the 747's turning wing, along with the lights of the small plane lifting away from it. It was hard not to look out into the night and smile. Whatever the pilot's reasons for taking to the sky that night, I've rarely had such a good view of my own.

Mark Vanhoenacker is a senior first officer for British Airways who flies Boeing 747-400s. He's the author of "Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot." You can reach Mark at mark@skyfaring.com.