Read Online Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker - Free Book Online
Authors: Mark Vanhoenacker
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other air-coastlines. At the poles many regions meet, the common points of many slices of aerial pie.
Though they are not well matched to terrestrial places, these regions have borders. Their names have histories. They are the countries of the sky.
All Japan lies in one region. The name of it is not Japan, but Fukuoka; yet within this sky country marked on the map we speak to controllers who answer variously to Sapporo Control, to Tokyo Control. America’s regions look much as its states might, if some pitiless war or committee had hugely reduced their number. Salt Lake City (abbreviated to Salt Lake, as in “contact now Salt Lake, on frequency 135.775”) covers parts of nine states, from southern Nevada, north over the Great Salt Lake itself and its city to the Canadian border, which it meets between the sky states of Seattle and Minneapolis. Southern Illinois is not part of Chicago; it’s divided between the dominions of Kansas City, Indianapolis (sometimes called Indy Center), and Memphis. There is a region called New York; yet most of New York State lies in Boston, which also encompasses all of New England.
In contrast to America’s consolidated sky states, many small European countries have kept their own regions. Switzerland has done so; its sky land is called Switzerland but it’s Swiss or Swiss Radar that the controllers answer to. “Swiss, good evening,” I might say, followed by my call sign. The region is so small, and planes so fast, that a jet may cross through it in minutes. Greek controllers may answer to Athens Control but their sky country is marked on charts as Hellas—Greece. On the busy routes along the Adriatic coast, a plane may be in the sky country known as Beograd—Belgrade—for only minutes; the controller there will say hello to us, before almost immediately transferring us to the next shard of the former Yugoslavia.
The sky known as Maastricht makes an auspicious contrast to such fractured air. Maastricht is the legacy and incarnation of a high, early dream of European integration that’s now sometimes called the Single European Sky. Perhaps the best-known volume of air to most European pilots, Maastricht covers the higher airspace of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, northwest Germany, and certain nearby areas, a whole and peaceful dominion that rises over some of the continent’s historically bloodiest borders. I’ve been to Maastricht, on the ground, but if you said the name to me, I would not think of the Dutch city, of earth-Maastricht. I would think instead of sky-Maastricht, this invisible block of the heavens resting on the fragmented history of the northwest corner of the continent. Sky-Maastricht is not Belgium or Luxembourg or the Netherlands, yet its cold aerial polyhedron, sharply bordered and as meaningless as sliced air, blankets them all—a new, improbably named country above Europe.
The names of air regions may not correspond to any place on earth that is familiar to me. The syllables then form a kind of aerial poetry, a drumbeat of far sky-lands beyond the next fold of the chart: Turkmenabat and its sister Turkmenbashi; Vientiane, Wuhan, and Kota Kinabalu; Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Norilsk, and Poliarny. Or the names match those of legend, those that might be among the last you would expect to rise to such prominence in the modern sky: Arkhangelsk and Dushanbe; and Samarkand, the city that Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta wrote of, which fell to Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan.
When I come across such far-sounding names I wish I knew how Maastricht sounds to, say, an Uzbek or Chinese pilot; if the peculiar lettering, the twinned a ’s and the cht contradict years of English lessons, to form a sound so unusual that it can only be from a curious place, the inland city of a small and venerable seafaring land. Or if a Dutch place name, heard or imagined from the other side of the world, instead sounds hardly different from English, a linguistic truth that
Though they are not well matched to terrestrial places, these regions have borders. Their names have histories. They are the countries of the sky.
All Japan lies in one region. The name of it is not Japan, but Fukuoka; yet within this sky country marked on the map we speak to controllers who answer variously to Sapporo Control, to Tokyo Control. America’s regions look much as its states might, if some pitiless war or committee had hugely reduced their number. Salt Lake City (abbreviated to Salt Lake, as in “contact now Salt Lake, on frequency 135.775”) covers parts of nine states, from southern Nevada, north over the Great Salt Lake itself and its city to the Canadian border, which it meets between the sky states of Seattle and Minneapolis. Southern Illinois is not part of Chicago; it’s divided between the dominions of Kansas City, Indianapolis (sometimes called Indy Center), and Memphis. There is a region called New York; yet most of New York State lies in Boston, which also encompasses all of New England.
In contrast to America’s consolidated sky states, many small European countries have kept their own regions. Switzerland has done so; its sky land is called Switzerland but it’s Swiss or Swiss Radar that the controllers answer to. “Swiss, good evening,” I might say, followed by my call sign. The region is so small, and planes so fast, that a jet may cross through it in minutes. Greek controllers may answer to Athens Control but their sky country is marked on charts as Hellas—Greece. On the busy routes along the Adriatic coast, a plane may be in the sky country known as Beograd—Belgrade—for only minutes; the controller there will say hello to us, before almost immediately transferring us to the next shard of the former Yugoslavia.
The sky known as Maastricht makes an auspicious contrast to such fractured air. Maastricht is the legacy and incarnation of a high, early dream of European integration that’s now sometimes called the Single European Sky. Perhaps the best-known volume of air to most European pilots, Maastricht covers the higher airspace of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, northwest Germany, and certain nearby areas, a whole and peaceful dominion that rises over some of the continent’s historically bloodiest borders. I’ve been to Maastricht, on the ground, but if you said the name to me, I would not think of the Dutch city, of earth-Maastricht. I would think instead of sky-Maastricht, this invisible block of the heavens resting on the fragmented history of the northwest corner of the continent. Sky-Maastricht is not Belgium or Luxembourg or the Netherlands, yet its cold aerial polyhedron, sharply bordered and as meaningless as sliced air, blankets them all—a new, improbably named country above Europe.
The names of air regions may not correspond to any place on earth that is familiar to me. The syllables then form a kind of aerial poetry, a drumbeat of far sky-lands beyond the next fold of the chart: Turkmenabat and its sister Turkmenbashi; Vientiane, Wuhan, and Kota Kinabalu; Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Norilsk, and Poliarny. Or the names match those of legend, those that might be among the last you would expect to rise to such prominence in the modern sky: Arkhangelsk and Dushanbe; and Samarkand, the city that Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta wrote of, which fell to Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan.
When I come across such far-sounding names I wish I knew how Maastricht sounds to, say, an Uzbek or Chinese pilot; if the peculiar lettering, the twinned a ’s and the cht contradict years of English lessons, to form a sound so unusual that it can only be from a curious place, the inland city of a small and venerable seafaring land. Or if a Dutch place name, heard or imagined from the other side of the world, instead sounds hardly different from English, a linguistic truth that
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