Read Online Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker - Free Book Online Page A

such pilots see borne out from the sky, where the Netherlands and southeast England may appear to rest only a few grammatical rules or major drainage projects away from each other. The question of what distant place names sound like arises in its purest form in the sky, where the pilots from all places cross all places.
    Other region names are familiar to pilots before we fly anywhere. London, Delhi, Bangkok; world cities beneath their eponymous air countries. Flying into these regions, it is almost as though we are entering the city’s aerial sphere of influence, the gravitational reference of the metropolis, as if we’re caught in its conceptual—and at night often its actual—glow. The grandeur inherent to the name of an enormous city is heightened further when American controllers occasionally append Center to the name of a region, preceded perhaps by The, as if part of a monarch’s style, or a city’s formal epithet. “Contact now The New York Center” has a certain ring to it, if at the moment we receive such an order the night is filled with the cloud of light rising up from the city itself.
    A sky country off West Africa is called Roberts. When I first saw this I was reminded of Robert FitzRoy, the meteorologist and the captain of Darwin’s ship HMS Beagle, because one of the areas in the BBC’s Shipping Forecast, FitzRoy, is named for him. These areas are an analogous kind of sea country, the white-capped conditions of which we may observe from above, and the names of which I became accustomed to when I flew early departures on the Airbus and would leave home long before dawn, drinking coffee and listening to the radio as I drove to Heathrow through the nearly empty wet-black streets of London. Roberts, the aerial region, takes its name from Liberia’s first president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, who was born in America and moved to Liberia when he was twenty. An enormous African sky will bear his name forever.

    In Britain, London is a noun; yet the region north of it is an adjective, Scottish. “Contact now Scottish,” a London controller will say in farewell to a northbound aircraft. To a southbound jet, meanwhile, a Scottish controller will say: “Call London,” and it is hard not to think of the BBC World Service identification, “This is London,” or “This is London calling,” the old voices that shared this air.
    Many regions have grand, waterborn names. Above South America lies Amazonica. I like it when a controller tells me to “contact now Rhein,” if I can see the river below. Many regions encompass vast swaths of airspace above oceans and reflect this in their names. There is Atlantico, which fences off a large sky in the central and southern Atlantic. The names Anchorage Oceanic and Anchorage Arctic are stretched over stormy, gray-and-white seas. They might be the names of ships. An enormous portion of the open Pacific is held on maps in the air-name of Oakland Oceanic, though pilots will speak to radio operators who answer to the name of San Francisco—a cross-bay rivalry drawn out over much of the Pacific. It is Oakland, though, that is the name of the sky, an ocean-straddling aerial empire whose extent might surprise the city’s residents, as might their city-sky’s borders with Manila, Ujung Pandang, Auckland, and Tahiti.

    There is air over northern Cyprus that is claimed by two regions, and so we speak to two controllers, on two different radios. There is a sliver of airspace off Norway that does not lie in any sky country at all. This no-man’s-sky splits Norway’s Bodø and Russia’s Murmansk like a knife, as if it were created by some blistering of the skies since they were first charted, or in an aerial version of how new islands rise from volcanoes in the sea. Another remaining nameless realm of sky lies in the Pacific, west of the Galapagos, north of the sky land Isla da Pascua—Easter Island. These blank spots are not what we would expect to find in the realm of the