A Gift of Wings

And a copy of the New York Post.

And the door opens below and a man saunters up the stairs, unhurried, chewing a toothpick.

“There you are, Johnny,” says the ground controller. “Thought I was going to go without lunch today.”

The lunchward-bound takes a moment to tell his relief which airplanes are where, and hands him the microphone. The relief nods, opens a soft-drink can, chewing all the while on that toothpick.

Way off at the edge of the mist, there’s a 707 touching down on 13 Left.

From here, the TWA terminal looks like the head and eyes of an enormous wasp, mandibles open, wings and body buried in the sand. It is watching the tower.

There are twenty airplanes waiting in line for takeoff.

“Here you go, Johnny-baby,” says the departure controller, handing a strip of paper marked with numbers.

“Hm. Another Hugenot,” Johnny-baby replies, looking at the numbers. “They’re gatherin’ at the gates.”

“Say, Bob, we’re going to run out of room here, with all these Hugenots … American 183, sir, you’ll have to turn around here, that portion of the taxiway is all closed.”

Down on the outer perimeter a 727 Trijet slows to a halt, then turns in cramped slow motion. A hundred yards ahead of him the taxiway is a rilled mass of bare earth, with graders combing it back and forth, back and forth.

“I wish they’d give us the airport b

ack,” Johnny says.

“Let’s call it forty minutes. Forty minutes delay …”

By the time I left the tower there was an hour’s delay, and the line for takeoff stood forty planes long.

Two quite separate kingdoms, this land of Kennedy. One is the Kingdom of the Passenger, wherein the customer rules and all bend to his wish. The passenger reigns over the ground outside, the concourses, the shops and services, Customs, ticket counter, airline offices, and the aftermost nine-tenths of every airplane, where stewardesses ply him with refreshment and confidence.

The other tenth of that airplane is the Kingdom of the Pilot. And pilots are fascinating stereotyped people. They are almost exclusively men who like flying more than anything else in all the world, who work on the flight decks of jet transports not out of a wish to help passengers reach their many ports but because they like to fly and they’re good at their job, most of them, and they wouldn’t be much use in any other job anywhere. The exceptions to the generality, the ones who could do well at other work, don’t make the best pilots. They can follow the numbers, all right, but when real flying skill is required (as it is at rare intervals nowadays and getting rarer), they are foreigners in the sky.

The best pilots are the ones who began flying when they were boys, who come to their gold-braid caps from turbulent histories of failure and distress in the ground-bound affairs of men. Not having the temperament or ability to bear the discipline and boredom of college, they failed or quit and took to flying full-time, enlisting in the Air Corps or making it the hard way—sweeping hangar floors, pumping gas as apprentice aviators, dusting crops, flying passenger rides, instructing, knocking about the country from one airport to the next, at last deciding to try the airlines since there’s nothing to lose, trying, and glory be, getting hired!

All pilots live the same sky the world around, but airline pilots have more trappings and live more rigidly than do any other kind; than even military pilots. They must shine their shoes, wear neckties, be kind to all passengers, follow each comany rule and Federal Air Regulation, never lose their temper.

In return for this, they receive (a) more money for less work than any tradesman anywhere, and, most important, (b) the privilege of flying excellent airplanes, without having to apologize to anybody.

Today the major airlines require college training of their pilot applicants, and so lose the best stick-and-rudder airmen to the nonscheduled airlines (who need better pilots anyway, to cope with a wider range of problems), to agricultural and corporate flying concerns. Why the college requirement, is unclear, since all that a zoology-trained pilot has to fall back upon is Ichthyology 201, while the life-trained pilot, whose ranks are legion but diminishing, flies his airplane home on knowing born of interest and love instead of company requirement.

The path between the kingdoms at Kennedy is at best one-way … no one walks the pilot’s kingdom who is not a pilot. And the path is very nearly no-way. The best of airmen is notoriously ill-at-ease on the ground, unless he is talking about flying, which he usually is and so makes do.

You can see it in the pilots coming off duty at Kennedy, all conservative uniforms and round-billed caps, whatever nation their airline. You’ll see them awkward, self-conscious, most of them, looking straight ahead, in a hurry to get out of the passengers’ kingdom and into somewhere more comfortable.

Each is painfully aware of his alien status in the concourses and decorated halls. To each there is nothing so indecipherable as the man who could choose to be passenger instead of pilot, the one who would choose any life but flight, who can stay away from the airplanes, not think about them even, and yet be happy. Passengers are a different race of humans, and pilots stay as far from them as courteously possible. Ask a pilot someday how many real friends he has who are not pilots themselves, and he will be hard-pressed to think of a single one.

The pilot is blissfully unaffected by anything that happens at the airport which does not directly bear on his flying—as far as he is concerned, the passengers’ kingdom doesn’t really exist, though occasionally he will look at the people with a benign sort of paternal affection. His world is very pure, without cynics or amateurs, and it is very simple. Its realities center on his airplane and fan out to include wind speed and direction, temperature, visibility, runway conditions, navigation aids, air traffic clearance, destination- and alternate-airport weather. That about locks it up. There are other elements: seniority, the six months’ physical examination, flight checks in the aircraft, but those are ancillary to his kingdom, not the core of it. If ground traffic is bumper-locked in ten thousand automobiles, if there is a construction workers’ strike, if organized crime is sordid and everywhere, stealing millions annually from the airport, he is completely untouched. The pilot’s only reality is his airplane and the forces that affect it in flight. That is why airline travel is the safest transportation in the history of man.

Perspective

I used to wonder, a few years ago, about railroad tracks. I’d stand between them, watch them go out into the world, and the two rails narrowed, they came together, they touched each other just five miles west, on the horizon. Monster locomotives would go hiss-thundering west through town, and since a locomotive is the kind of giant that needs its rails set just so, I knew there had to be a great pile of steaming wreckage just beyond the place where the tracks came together. I knew that the engineers had to be fiercely brave men, blurring past the Main Street crossing with a grin and a wave, facing certain death on the horizon.

Eventually, I found that the railroad tracks didn’t really meet beyond our town, but I didn’t get over my awe around railroad men till the day I met my first airplane. Since then, I’ve followed track all over the country and haven’t yet seen a set of rails come together. Ever. Anywhere.

I used to wonder, a few years ago, about fog and rain: why was it, some days, that the whole earth was gray and wet, the whole world a miserable, flat, sad place to live? I wondered how bleakness happened to the whole planet at once, and how it was that the sun, so bright yesterday, had turned to ash. Books tried to explain, but it wasn’t till I began to know an airplane that I found that clouds don’t cover the whole world at all—that even from where I stood in the worst of the rain, soaking wet on the runway, all I had to do to find the sun again was to fly above the clouds.

It wasn’t easy to do that. There were certain definite rules to follow, if I really wished to gain the freedom of clear air. If I chose to ignore those rules, if I chose to thrash around wildly, to insist that I could tell up from down all on my own, following the impulse of the body instead of the logic of understanding, I would invariably fall down. In order to find that sun, even today, I have to ignore what seems right to my eyes and hands, and rely totally on the instruments given me, no matter how strangely they seem to speak, how senseless they appear to be. Trusting those instruments is the only possible way anyone can ever break out into the sunlight. The thicker and darker the cloud, I found, the longer and more carefully I had to trust the pointers and my skill in knowing what they say. I proved it over and again: if only I kept climbing, I could reach the top of any storm, and lift into the sun at last.