About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (12 page)

What planes fly, generally, is what people imagine they want. Right now.

B
ACK AT
D. F. Malan International Airport in Cape Town, I watched a six-man crew load freight—Cape wines, salted snook headed for New York fish counters, 3,056 pounds of ostrich meat bound for Brussels, one Wheaton terrier named Diggs for Toronto.

Standing there on the ramp, I asked my companion if he knew about the first shipment of airfreight, in 1910. No, he didn’t. It was 542 square yards of silk, I said, carried sixty miles from Dayton to Columbus, Ohio. It cost Morehouse-Martens of Columbus $5,000, but they made a profit of more than $1,000 by cutting the fabric up into small pieces and selling them as souvenirs to customers at their dry-goods store.

He told me the fellow shipping ostrich meat, frustrated by a lack of cargo space out of Cape Town, had a restaurant in California interested, but without the space he couldn’t close the
deal. We were looking, at that moment, at the aircraft I had come in on, a 747–400 passenger plane with about 5,900 cubic feet of lower-hold cargo space (passenger baggage might take up only 20 percent of this). Depending on the demand for seating, KLM might occasionally fly a 747–400 Combi into Cape Town. In this aircraft, the aft section of the main deck is given over to seven pallets of freight, while passengers are seated in the forward section—an efficient way for airlines to take advantage of fluctuations in both passenger and freight markets.

Tons of fish, he said, let alone more ostrich meat, could be shipped from Cape Town, if only he could guarantee his customers the room. Today he’d be happy to squeeze a surfboard into the bulk-cargo hold, the space farthest aft on the lower deck, a last-on, first-off, loose-loaded compartment, where mail, air waybills, crew baggage, and, today, the Wheaton terrier went. We continued to exchange stories about peculiar things one sees on board—a yacht headed for an America’s Cup race; a tropical-hardwood bowling alley from Bangkok; in San Francisco enough boxed Bing cherries, tied three to a bunch and packed neat as flashlight batteries, to fill one 747 freighter after another (27,000 cubic feet). They’re not supposed to, I said, but one of the pilots told me he liked to sit in the Ferraris and Lamborghinis he flew. “I’ve driven them many miles,” the pilot mused, “and very fast.”

Business was good, I told my guide, but strange. Two days before, on what pilots call the Tashkent Route between Europe and the cities of Karachi, Delhi, Bangkok, Singapore, and Jakarta (via Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan, because the Himalayas are too high and Iranian air space too dangerous), I had seen rocket fire and streams of tracer ammunition in Kabul, Taliban “extremists” and their entrenched opponents. People were being shot dead below, but to the east a full moon was rising rapidly, orange and huge as the sun. It silhouetted sharply the sawtooth peaks of southern ranges in the Hindu Kush. And farther to the southeast, beyond the Khyber Pass and high above the Indus River, a hundred miles of lightning bolts flared and jangled along a storm front. With one glance I took it all in: rockets
flaming across the streets below, the silent moon, rain falling in the Indus Valley from a ceiling of cloud, above which the black vault of the sky glittered with stars.

On the Tashkent Route, I continued, air-traffic controllers in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, pass you on to Lahore, skipping chaotic Kabul altogether. Their voices crackle on the high-frequency radio like explosions of glass, trilling aviation English in the high-pitched intonation of a muezzin. At Lahore, you can see the Pakistani border stretching away north into the Punjab, a beaded snake of security lighting. From here west all the way to Libya (whose air-traffic controllers reprimand careless pilots that it is not “Libya” but “Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah Territory”), religious and political tension is pointedly apparent from the sky. Coming up from Dubai, we would swing far out to the west, over Saudi Arabia, to fly wide of Iraq, then dogleg north across Jordan, staying to the east of Israel. Leaving Lebanon’s skies, we’d enter disputed air space over eastern Cyprus. Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot air-traffic controllers do not play dangerous games with commercial aircraft, but, together with the Syrians, they contest the right among themselves to assign you flight levels and headings. Once across Turkey we’d bear north to stay wide of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Every pilot I spoke with, I said to the young KLM freight manager, had a story of the white-orange flash of lethal fighting seen from above, the named and unnamed wars of the modern era, fought in Timor, in the Punjab, in what were once called the lawless hinterlands, but which are now as accessible as Detroit or Alice Springs.

O
N THE RETURN FLIGHT
from Cape Town to Johannesburg, I glanced through data comparing this 747–400 with others in KLM’s fleet.
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Each 747, despite being built to the same specifications
and being fitted with the same engines, consistently burns slightly more or less fuel, or “performs differently against the book.” Northwest Airlines flies eight 747–200 freighters into the Far East; I flew on four of them, trying to gain a feeling for their personalities. (With so much history, distance, and weather, I reasoned—so many minor accidents, replaced engines, and strange cargos—there had to be personality.) Once I stayed with a single aircraft through five crew changes, from Hong Kong to Tokyo, then on to Anchorage, Chicago, and New York before turning back for Seattle—in all about 12,000 nautical miles in 56 hours. Reading the plane’s operating certificates (posted on a lavatory bulkhead in the cockpit) and its logbooks, and poking into all its accessible spaces, what I found was distinctiveness, not personality.

It was 2:30 in the morning and raining when we landed in Seattle. After the dehydrating hours aloft, mildly hypoxic, my tissues swollen from undissolved nitrogen, I was glad for the wet, oxygen-rich air at sea level. With a security escort shifting idly from one foot to the other at my side, I drew the night air in deeply and brushed rain across my face. I’d been with the plane for so many hours—I periodically rolled a pad and sleeping bag out on the floor of the flight deck to sleep—that an uncomplicated affection had built up for all it had accomplished while the crews came and went. Its engines were silent now, still. I walked beneath it in the dim illumination from warehouse lights.

The freighter’s belly—this was plane 6729F—was glazed with a thin oil film. In it, and in exhaust grime on the engines’ housings, mechanics had finger-traced graffiti. (Inside, on cargo compartment walls, ground crews often scrawl insults—some of a sexual nature—aimed at ground crews in other cities. On inaccessible surfaces within the wings, I was told by riveters at the Boeing plant, some paint declarations of love.) I made a mental note to check 6729F’s technical log, a sort of running medical history of the aircraft, to see when it had last been “A-B-C-Ded,” a forty-day swarming by mechanics during which every structural part, every rivet, every wire, is examined or X-rayed.

The fifteen-year-old plane’s thin (.063 inches) tempered aluminum
skin was scraped and dented and it bore a half dozen aluminum patches. (In an effort to keep a plane on schedule, some of these minor tears are first repaired provisionally with “speed tape.”) Its windows were micropitted, its 32-ply tires slightly worn, its livery paint chipped. Looking aft from a point near the turn of its flat, streaked belly, I realized the plane had the curved flanks of a baleen whale, in an identical scale, exact to the extended flukes of its horizonal stabilizer.

Overall the freighter had a lean, polished, muscular patina. It flew in the working world.

I
FIRST FLEW
with horses on another Northwest flight, out of Chicago’s O’Hare on a bitterly cold February night.
^*
These sixteen were headed for lives on Hokkaido ranches among the well-to-do: a Percheron stallion, twelve Appaloosas, and three quarter horses, accompanied by two handlers.

We were delayed three hours getting out. The driver of one of the loaders, a steerable platform used to raise cargo fifteen feet to the rear cargo door, accidentally rammed the plane, punching a hole in a canoe fairing (a cover protecting the jackscrew that extends and retracts the plane’s flaps, and which “fairs” or tapers this protrusion into the wing). We also had to replace an exhaust-gas temperature gauge on the number-three engine, the sort of maintenance that goes on regularly.

The pilot made a shallow climb out of Chicago to lessen the strain on the horses’ back legs. He headed out over Wisconsin and Minnesota on a slight zigzag that would take us from one way point to another en route to Anchorage. Planes rarely fly a direct route between airports unless the skies are relatively empty, usually late at night, the time when most freight moves. Freighter
pilots, some of whom wear bat wings on their tunics instead of eagle wings and refer to themselves as “freight dogs,” call it “flying the backside of the clock.”

Soon after we’re airborne I go down to look at the horses. The main deck temperature has been set at 55 degrees so I take a jacket. The animals are lined up in six stalls on the right side of the aircraft, the 2,100-pound black Percheron in the first stall with a bred quarter horse; behind them a leopard Appaloosa stallion with a bred Appaloosa; and behind them, downwind in the flow of air, four stalls of bred and “open” mares, with four fillies and colts. They aren’t sedated, most are dozing. They’ve been left unshod to give them a better hold on the stall floor, and won’t be watered or fed for twenty-four hours in transit. Hemmed in by the usual farrago—aortic valves, poultry-processing equipment, mainframe computers, golf clubs, men’s knit underwear—the horses seem strangely peaceful. I can’t hear their breathing or stomach noises over the sound of the engines. I turn the lights out and leave them be.

On the flight deck, a narrow space like a railway-car living room, the horse handlers are slumped with novels in a single row of three tourist-class seats toward the rear, the only three passenger seats available besides the jump seat. The flight engineer has just brewed a fresh pot of coffee. I settle in behind the captain to peruse the flight manifests. I gaze out the window. Every few minutes I look at the instrument panel in front of the copilot and at the hydraulic, fuel, and electrical panels in front of the flight engineer, sitting a few inches to my right.

The 747 is not the biggest freighter in the world, but in every other way—making long hauls economically on a scheduled basis—it is unrivaled. The biggest plane in regular service is the Russian Antonov 124, a fuel-guzzling, hulking beast of an aircraft that works at the fringes of the world of airfreight, hauling unusual loads on a charter basis. The only way to move emergency equipment (oil-skimming boats, fire-fighting trucks) or large quantities of emergency supplies (medicine, food, gas masks, cots) quickly around the world is on airfreighters, and the Antonov 124 ferries such material routinely, and many more unusual
things: French fighter planes to Venezuela; 132 tons of stage equipment for a Michael Jackson concert in Bucharest; a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant, complete, to Buenos Aires; a 38-ton bull gear to repair an oil tanker stranded in the Persian Gulf; 36,000 cubic feet of cigarettes per flight on repeated trips between Amsterdam and Moscow during the breakup of the Soviet Union.

When we pass through 18,000 feet, the flight engineer sets our altimeters to read against an atmospheric pressure of 29.92 inches of mercury. We’ll calibrate altitude against this pressure until we descend on approach into Anchorage, an agreed-upon standard that ensures planes all over the world will be figuring their altitudes on the same basis once they leave the air space around an airport. We’ve also left local time behind. Now all our communications are based on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), formerly Greenwich Mean Time or Zulu time, as it is still sometimes called (the Earth’s time zones having once been divided among the letters of the alphabet). Another universal grid we are fixed in is degrees and minutes of latitude and longitude. And altitude, of course. (The altimeter always shows altitude above mean sea level; if the altimeter reads 7,500 feet over Mexico City, you are 100 feet off the ground.)

These grids provide a common reference, and their uniformity makes flying safer; but there are dissenters around the globe, especially where time zones are concerned. Tonga, along with Russia’s Chukotski Peninsula, insists on occupying a twenty-fifth time zone. When it’s 12:15 Sunday morning in Tonga, it’s 11:15 Friday night in Western Samoa, a few hundred miles to the northeast. And against UTC whole hours, central Australia stays on the half hour, Nepal keeps to a three-quarter hour, and Suriname adheres to ten minutes before the hour.
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Virtually everyone communicates over the radio in English, but it is often heavily accented English, and outside customary requests and responses, English is of limited use in areas like China or in what pilots call Sea Asia. Russian pilots, for their part, are unique in insisting on the use of meters per second instead of knots for air speed, and on meters instead of feet for altitude. In addition, Russian commercial planes don’t use the Traffic Collision Avoidance System, which warns of approaching aircraft; nor do they send out a signal so planes with that system will know they’re there. To politely register their disapproval of these tenuous arrangements, European pilots flash their landing lights at approaching Russian planes (which air-traffic controllers have alerted them are there) and wait for a response.

The wide acceptance of such standardized measurements and procedures can lead to the impression that a generally convivial agreement obtains throughout the world. And when, in one week, you transport the same sorts of freight to Cairo, Melbourne, and Rio de Janeiro, it is also easy to draw the conclusion that people everywhere want more or less the same things. However pervasive, the view is illusory. The airplane’s speed and geographic reach benefit the spread of a European and North American consumer ethic, but not all the world’s cultures can be folded into this shape. One need only leave the airport in Lima or Calcutta or Harare to see how true this is. It is not merely poverty and starvation you see, the ringing of another music you hear, or inversions of Western intuition you observe. It is starkly different renderings of the valuable.