article: SKYFARING . by Mark Vanhoenacker . (Chatto & Windus £16.99) Our fascination with aeroplanes, and the men who fly them (it is still overwhelmingly men), has acquired a morbid flavour since Germanwings flight 9525 was deliberately crashed into the French Alps by its troubled co-pilot Andreas Lubitz. The tragedy ignited an ongoing debate about stress and depression among pilots, and airline vetting procedures, in which just about all of us have a vested interest. This makes Mark Vanhoenacker’s book, unwittingly, very timely indeed. When he was writing it he had never heard of Lubitz, of course, but nor does he dwell on the horrors of 9/11 or any other plane crashes either accidental or premeditated. Vanhoenacker is a senior first officer with British Airways, who wants us simply to understand his passion for his job, and to share with us many of its more beguiling secrets. Like me, he was still a child when he was first invited into an aeroplane cockpit, and like me, he regarded it as one of the transcendent treats of his young life. But for him, the mystique endured. It is reassuring, now more than ever, to be reminded that even for experienced pilots air travel can still be an exhilarating, almost magical experience. Mark Vanhoenacker is a senior first officer with British Airways and he wants the reader to simply understand his passion for his job . Vanhoenacker, an American, worked as a management consultant before rekindling that childhood obsession. He learned to fly in Britain, tempted by our ‘historic relationship with aviation’. Coincidentally, his first job was to pilot the Airbus 320 on medium-distance European flights — exactly what Lubitz was doing on that catastrophically fateful day. But Vanhoenacker moved on to Boeing 747s, and they are his great love. He admires the 747 like a sculptor might a perfect human torso, observing how pleasing they are to the eye. Vanhoenacker recalls a wildlife writer once describing Virginia’s great blue heron as ‘the 747 of the swamp’ and notes how this would delight the aircraft’s chief designer, Joseph Sutter, who was greatly influenced by the anatomy of birds. But Sutter (now in his mid-90s) once stated that the 747 is more ‘a place’ than a conveyance. Pilots like flying 747s for all kinds of reasons, Vanhoenacker tells us, but not the least of them is one of the most prosaic: unlike the Airbus, in which pilots usually wear heavy socks, they have foot heaters. And the ‘frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean looks better — everything looks better — when your feet are warm’. He writes elegantly about his pilot’s eye view of the world and explains that he has come to measure countries in jet time, ie how long they take to cross. Thus, Russia is a seven-hour country and Belgium, with a tailwind, is merely a 15-minute country. Noting the vast, desolate regions he routinely flies over, it does not surprise him that, according to one calculation, the portion of the Earth’s surface on which an unclothed human could survive for 24 hours is just 15 per cent. But of even more interest, certainly to those of us who occasionally fly long-haul, are the nuts and bolts of those journeys. Vanhoenacker will get to the airport 90 minutes before he pilots his 747 to Los Angeles or Tokyo, and there will meet the rest of the crew, 20 or so strong. And ‘meet’ really means ‘meet’: air crews do not move as a pack, and are usually strangers to each other. As he puts it, ‘our nametags are not worn only for passengers... There is a reasonable chance we may never speak to each other again in our lives.’ Before boarding, he will brief the cabin crew on what kind of flight time and weather to expect, while they will tell him if there’s anything noteworthy about the passenger roster, and whether any of the BA staff on board have friends or family on the flight, people known, splendidly, as ‘Klingons’. Unsurprisingly, life on a 747 is full of jargon: a second co-pilot on longer flights is known as ‘the heavy’, one acting as ‘heavy out’, the other as ‘heavy home’. And for a pilot, the sky is full of aerial milestones called waypoints, with names usually comprising five capital letters. These often relate directly to the place below, so above Boston in Vanhoenacker’s home state, there is the waypoint LBSTA, referring to the region’s prized shellfish, and another, NIMOY, after one of the city’s more notable sons, the late actor Leonard Nimoy, who played Mr Spock in Star Trek. But other names are harder to explain. Above St Louis, Missouri, are the waypoints ANNII and LENXX. Vanhoenacker’s best guess is that an air-traffic controller there was a fan of Eurythmics’ singer Annie Lennox. Who would have thought that the mysteries of flying would embrace Mr Spock, Klingons and Annie Lennox? Skyfaring is crammed with these revelations and more, while the acknowledgments end on a plaintive note. Maybe one day, Vanhoenacker hopes, wide-eyed children will again be allowed in the cockpit during a flight. In the meantime, he does a very good job of telling us what happens in there, and why we should still trust the men at the controls.
highlights: The Germanwings tragedy has ignited debate about depression in pilots .
  Author, Vanhoenacker is a senior first officer with British Airways .
  He wants the reader to simply understand his passion for his job .
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