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

airplanes more often associated with the dispelling of the world’s final mysteries of place.
    In Africa the region Brazzaville answers to Brazza. The quality of radio transmissions is not always good here and it is often said twice, loudly. If you say to long-haul pilots, in a clear strong voice: “Brazza, Brazza!” they may smile and think back to the early hours of nights that passed under equatorial African stars. Two sororal skies of West Africa are perhaps the world’s most gracefully named: Dakar Terrestre, which beyond the coast falls away to Dakar Oceanique. Here is Dakar, its earth-sky and its sea-sky.
    There is a majesty to the borderlands, where pilots will transfer from one set of controllers to another. Here a flight, as we say, will be handed over, from one place-name to the next, and so on over the world. Often one region will give us to the dominion of another a few miles before the actual border. “Call now Jeddah,” the controller will say to us, “you are released.”
    —

    A pilot may acquire an affectionate awareness of a kind of punctuation or asterisking of the world, composed of the names of small places, places that almost no one other than pilots will have reason to think of regularly.
    Many milestones are elevated this way because they are home to a radio beacon. It’s hard not to think of older beacons, lit to help navigate, as with lighthouses, or to transmit warnings, as with the news of the sightings of the Spanish Armada, or to celebrate events such as coronations and jubilees. In the 1920s, hundreds of light beacons, often placed high on mountaintops, inaugurated the first transcontinental airmail flights, from New York to San Francisco. This cross-country trail of light echoed the railroads, of course, but also the Pony Express, as pilots and planes would change en route, allowing letters to make an almost continuous journey from one coast to the other. There was even talk of a “lighted airway” across the Atlantic for dirigibles. Today, particularly in the western United States, some of the radio beacons used by modern airliners are sited just where those original light beacons once stood.
    Pilots can manually tune a beacon and see our distance and bearing from it, a basic, old-school check of our position. But in the background a modern aircraft is always searching for them, like a driver in an unfamiliar town constantly seeking landmarks and street signs. Beacons have only a certain range, and when the aircraft finds one, its codes may flicker to life on one of our screens, and in this way we come to know the names of many of the beacons of the world.
    Near the tip of Cape Cod, on the ocean side, stands a beacon that is a curiosity to those walking near the beach and that shares a name, appropriately, with Marconi, the Italian engineer known as the father of radio. Beacons like this one and the plane speak to each other, like children playing Marco Polo in a pool. The plane counts the time between its call of “Marco!” and the beacon’s reply of “Polo!” and so calculates the distance between them.

    In the more remote regions of the world beacons and airports often coincide; the beacon is there because the airport is there. When such a place is surrounded by nothing else that relates to aviation, its isolation lifts it into unexpected prominence in the sky. In Greenland is the airport named Aasiaat. It is on a bay I would like to visit one day, because it bears the marvelous name familiar to armchair atlas ponderers, long-haul pilots, and almost no one else: Disko Bay. The names of many small places in the far north of Canada have the quality of making bitterly cold water sound warmer than it can ever be—Pond Inlet, Sandy Bay, Hall Beach, and Coral Harbor. There are airports such as Churchill’s, in Canada, that are the only suitable runway for many miles in any direction. Often as white as paper, Churchill is habitually visited by polar bears; it stands on