Flying is becoming socially taboo. The tide of anti-airplane sentiment is still relatively low in North America, compared to in the UK, where nearly half of the citizens are vowing to fly less for environmental reasons, and one in eight teenagers supports the idea of a ban on “travelling by air for leisure purposes.” Are we, as David Beers in his July/Aug 2008 Walrus piece suggests, at the end of an era?
Common predictions suggest that even if it isn’t totally socially taboo to take a plane, it still may be financially impossible to do so for the majority of people in Canada and the US, due to the dwindling supply of fossil fuels. The languishing airline industry will continue to merge and shrink (albeit with a few companies supported by government, according to the “too big to fail” principle). Flying, many forecast, will be the exclusive privilege of the elite once more.
At present, though, many of us still do fly. How can we fully appreciate this gift? We have tapped nature’s reserves of millions of years, billions of hours of sunlight, in order to skip across the globe. No generation in history has been able to experience this on the current scale, and it’s possible that no generation will again, at least in the way we enjoy. What have we learned from our time in the air? Can we, as a global civilization, get something out of this experience besides increased CO2 levels?
When you spend every night in an aircraft, for stretches of forty consecutive nights, the way you see the world changes. In recent years, I worked an aerial-mapping job, where I would spend hundreds of days or nights a year at 28,000 feet. (I quit the job in large part due to the growing unease with the environmental impact, and am still working to kick my flight addiction altogether.) Most of those nights would be spent gazing at the lights or forms below. When you spend so much of your time suspended above the earth, the features of the earth that normally seem so solid, that make up the everyday world—buildings, roads, hills—eventually seem like a shallow layer of buildup on the planet, an insignificant crust, scratch marks on a vast surface. You begin to visualize yourself as a dot: traversing space, traversing mountain ranges and the invisible borders of countries each night.
There is a disturbing aspect to this transformation of perception, but it also allows great potential for beauty. You become acquainted with the poetry of the forms in the earth at the macro level. Mist sinking into the recesses of a valley, glaring white snow gathered in the hollow of a mountain, canyons that speak of water’s persistence, the tendrils of a river delta: held at a distance, the earth can be admired like a beautiful body. Separated from it, with distance, without the earthly inconveniences of cold rain, mud, or mosquitoes, the earth offers itself to a new view, a reverend view.
The scale of human impact is also betrayed from the air: one realizes how vast the ocean is, how there are vast untouched spaces in North America still. Or, that the colour of the Arabian peninsula is red. That humans can leave little mark on the barren Andes: relief. The burnished buildings of Venice rising from the blue lagoon. But also: the sprawl of Phoenix, Arizona; the smog smothering Dubai, its brand new mansions hanging on the fringes of absolute sand. The phosphorus mines outside Miami: white scars. The slums of El Alto or Rio. Clearcuts in British Columbia. The greenhouses of Holland suffused with yellow light in the middle of the night. From the air, all is revealed.
Air travel, despite the rote complaints of cardboard food and security searches, still opens the way for an encounter with the sublime. I am baffled by people who choose aisle seats: how could one decline the opportunity to contemplate the clouds? The air traveler becomes intimate with a whole other realm. Pilots, especially, become part of this superterranean world. They have the inside knowledge of how to read air charts and wind forecasts; they know when to ask for an amended flight plan due to a cumulative buildup, or when to set the flaps to twenty on descent. Mountain waves, wingtip vortices, VFR approach: they speak the language of the skies; they created a language for the skies. It isn’t just the language that fascinates me, though, but the knowledge it represents. None of the pilots I ever flew with ever indicated a mastery of the realm above; rather, they had a respect for it. They had a knowledge of how the world above operated, but also knew that us humans are out of our element at altitude—that we have to respect its laws, that we are guests when we enter the air. It’s a way of thinking that could be useful here on earth.
The places where human life intersects with the sky-realm can be the most poignant: glimpsing tiny fireworks from above, someone’s fourth of July celebration. Or listening in on distress calls over the radio: a passenger on a flight bound for Houston has a medical emergency and the aircraft is looking for an airport to land in; a small prop plane over the dark desert is nearly out of fuel and can’t see the landing strip indicated on his flight chart. Even though the air above us is some of the most controlled space on the planet, it is still recognized that anything can happen. The space is entirely ordered, charted, regulated—yet in a way, nothing is really up to us.
There are powerful lessons from our time in the skies: a respect for nature, a sense of how vast-yet-small the world is, a sense of how the planet is both more immune to human life—and more fragile—than we could possibly realize. Flying allows us to conceive of the world as one creation, without borders, varied and yet the same throughout. I hope this perspective-from-above doesn’t fade from human consciousness anytime soon; I hope our great-grandchildren will still understand what it was like to fly, though they may be unable to take to the skies themselves. Hopefully, the view of the earth from altitude will be embedded in the collective unconscious for centuries to come. We’ll have to put our stock in artists, writers, and Google Earth to carry this perspective on: there must be a way we can give up flight gracefully, but still be able to use this lens on the planet which flying has lent us.
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