More than thirteen hundred commercial aircraft cross into Atlantic Ocean airspace every day, and the number increases steadily, by about 5 percent each year. By far the greatest number of the planes fly across the northern part of the hourglass-shaped sea—414,000 planes checked in with its major oceanic air traffic control centers in the north during the calendar year 2006, for example. If to these are added the planes that cross from the South Atlantic up into the North and come back again, and the relatively few aircraft that cross just between the South American and African destinations, and in doing so fly over the lonely Atlantic waters to the south of the Tropic of Capricorn, then one comes up with a total figure of around 475,000 Atlantic transits every year: some 1,301 flights each day.
They do their crossing in two great waves, which in a time-lapse animation of the radar contacts look like spurts of molten gold radiating from the continents and out over the sea. First come the westbound jets trying in vain to chase the sun72 by traveling generally in daylight; in contrast those going east, heading back into the Old World, fly out in the American darkness and land, by and large, early in the European morning. At any one hour of day or night there are perhaps fifty of these aircraft in flight over the sea—ten thousand human beings passing by every hour, reading, sleeping, eating, watching movies, writing, seven miles up in the sky.
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And yet from these little seven-mile-high cities in flight, only a very few of the populations will ever care to look down for more than an inquisitive instant at the wrinkled surface of the sea below, or at the thick mass of gray-white cloud that so frequently obscures it from view. These people are mostly quite careless of the ocean’s very existence: it is merely an expanse to be crossed—the pond, if it is crossed quickly and casually, or something irritating and even less flatteringly named if it takes their aircraft countless hours to traverse.
The fact of inexpensive transoceanic travel has taken much the mystery of the sea away, has made us indifferent to its existence. Since the crossing of oceans has become tedious to most who do it, the oceans themselves have become the object of tedium as well. Once they were feared; they inspired awe, amazement, and mystery. Now they are to many just a barrier, an inconvenience—too large as entities properly to contemplate, too annoying as presences to warrant much care. The public attitude to the great seas has changed—and this change has had consequences for the great seas, few of them any good.
It has helped in particular to set the scene for what some worried few see as the endgame of humankind’s Atlantic story. It is nothing very new, of course. Man has been carelessly despoiling the oceans for decades. Ever since the first factory was built beside the water, ever since the first sewer pipe was laid in an industrial port city, and ever since we started, either casually or deliberately, to spill our wastes and our chemicals into the ocean’s immense and blameless sink, we have displayed a propensity to ruin it, to violate it. The land we have to live with, and so we pay it some measure of attention; the ocean, by contrast, is largely beyond our sight. It is so immense it can tolerate—or so we used to think—an immense amount of systemic misuse.
In Victorian times, though, we still thought of the ocean as vast and frightening; we still regarded it with some kind of awed respect. Not anymore. Passenger aircraft have shrunk the Atlantic’s vastness to a manageable size and thereby have also shrunk our capacity to be so impressed by it. People sail across the Atlantic on their own these days, and in summertime almost as a matter of routine. The westbound sailing route from Cornwall to the Caribbean by way of the Azores is regarded as so easy of accomplishment as to be referred to disparagingly by the harder-nosed and misogynist yachtsmen as merely “the ladies’ route.” Some people have taken to rowing across the Atlantic, at first in pairs, then alone. One day someone with a lot of spare time and a willingness to be swaddled in many tons of grease will probably contrive to swim it. The ocean is no longer so challenging a prospect as it once was. It stands in the public imagination rather as Mount Everest once did: now that we have conquered it, we perceive it as somehow manageable, and on the way to being even, dare one say it, trivial.
And in lockstep with this change of perception—not necessarily caused by it, but certainly coincident with it—there has been a steady lessening, some would say an actual abandonment, of humankind’s duty of care toward it. Such has already happened to Mount Everest: the base camp near Thyangboche is a slum, and the main route by way of the Western Cwm is strewn with castoffs; even the summit has as much junk on it as it does joyous flags. And now we are doing much the same to the world’s seas, dealing all too thoughtlessly with them in ways that many say are threatening the seas’ serenity, if not their very survival.
The oceans are under inadvertent attack, and as never before. Insofar as the Atlantic Ocean is the most used, traversed, and plundered of all oceans, so it is the body of water that is currently most threatened. Even though the central Pacific has attracted a lot of recent infamy because local gyres have swept a spectacular amount of ugly flotsam into mid-ocean patches the size of small states, it is actually the Atlantic that is in the greater trouble. It is subject to much more use—and so very much more misuse—all of it crammed into a much smaller space. It was the first great body of water to be crossed, it is now by far the busiest and is inarguably the most vital—but it has become evidently the least pristine and the most begrimed.
Yet awesome it remains, to some. In the British Airways operations center—a place of numberless computer screens and charts and weather forecasting maps and enormous panels of flashing pixels, and with dozens of serious-looking men and women73 who are charged with keeping tabs on all the people, animals, and boxes of freight currently in flight around the world, and making as sure as they could that all of them were safe and on schedule and the people as content as it is possible to be on an airplane—there is little doubt that to all of them, twenty-four hours a day, the great ocean is still held very much in awe. Great seas are not kindly entities over which to fly: if your aircraft somehow fails, where, exactly, do you put down? No pilot leaves the chocks for a transoceanic flight without remembering the first axiom in flight school: takeoff is voluntary, but landing is compulsory. And in the middle of an ocean it is self-evidently true not just that there is nowhere to land, but that there just is no land. No land at all.
Those who pioneered the practice of flying over seawater knew that all too well. Crossing a large expanse of sea perhaps didn’t trouble Louis Blériot when he flew his tiny monoplane across the English Channel from Calais to Dover in 1909, just six years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. For although Blériot admitted to being alone above “an immense body of water” for fully ten minutes, he also had the comfort of knowing a French destroyer was below him, monitoring his flight and ready to save him if he ditched. And for most of his thirty-seven-minute crossing, and even though he was only 250 feet up in the air, he could see the coast of France behind him and by peering ahead the white cliffs of England before him. Blériot won the thousand pounds that Lord Northcliffe had offered through his newspaper, the Daily Mail, and he became—not least because his boulevardier’s mustache and his reputation as a barnstorming air racer—an immediate superstar, and very much the ladies’ heartthrob.
But it was one thing to cross the Channel, quite another to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. Lord Northcliffe put up ten times the sum for anyone who dared try it; and though he announced it in 1913, it was not until six years later (with admittedly, a four-year hiatus for the Great War to pass) that the prize was won, and by a pair of Royal Air Force officers whose names, by a small injustice of history are still not quite as known as that of Blériot: Jack Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown.
Jack Alcock (left) and Arthur Whitten Brown, standing beside a Vickers Vimy heavy bomber in which they and their two pet kittens crossed the Atlantic nonstop in June 1919.
The venture was Alcock’s idea, conceived wh
en he was imprisoned by the Turks after ditching his fighter plane in the sea near Gallipoli. Why not have a bash? he said. The pair used for the attempt a stripped-down long-range Vickers Vimy biplane, its bomb bays filled with extra fuel. In the summer of 1919, they dismantled the plane and crated it up so it could be sent by ship to Newfoundland. There they built their own runway for takeoff. They did not know where they might land—it could be a field, or a beach, or an Irish lane: it turned out to be a bog.
Plenty of others were trying for the same prize—among them an American, Albert Cushing Read, who flew a seaplane to the Azores, stayed there for a week, and then flew on to Portugal: it took eleven days, and American warships were stationed under his path every fifty miles along the proposed route. However, Lord Northcliffe had decreed that his prize was for a nonstop journey, achieved in less than seventy-two hours, so Read did not win it. Nor did a Australian tearaway named Harry Hawker, who tried it in an experimental long-range plane, a Sopwith Atlantic. When its engine overheated, Hawker spotted an eastbound ship five hundred miles short of Ireland and ditched; he was picked up and went home by sea. Because the ship had not yet acquired a radio, its crew could not tell Hawker’s relatives of his rescue. Instead Mr. and Mrs. Hawker were shocked to get an official black-bordered telegram from King George offering royal condolence for their son’s supposed loss. The better news came later.
The dashing aviators—Jack Alcock in a blue serge suit and Brown in his Royal Flying Corps uniform, with 865 gallons of fuel and a pair of small black cats named Twinkletoes and Lucky Jim—set off on the morning of Saturday, June 14. They had horrendous problems—up at twelve thousand feet their instruments froze solid, their radio broke, their exhaust pipe ruptured, Brown had to climb onto the wings to break off ice,74 they became disoriented trying to watch the stately heeling of the stars in order to navigate, and went into a spin down through the clouds until almost hitting the waves—and when they finally arrived over the coast of Ireland, they could not find a place sufficiently free of rocks on which to land. Finally they spotted the masts of a radio station, circled it a number of times without at first managing to wake anyone—it was 8 A.M. on an Irish Sunday, and the aftereffects of Guinness must have trumped the callings of piety—and settled the plane onto a field, crash-landed, and ended up nose down in soggy black peat.
They were in County Galway, near a hamlet of Clifden. When the radiomen awoke and realized who the two fliers were, they telegraphed news of their achievement to London. The pair became rich and famous overnight and were knighted by the king only weeks later. Sir John Alcock was killed in a flying accident just a year afterward, and Sir Arthur Whitten Brown lived until 1948. They had crossed the ocean, without stopping, and they had done it in sixteen hours and twenty-seven minutes. When the much more showy and popular Charles Lindbergh single-handedly flew the Spirit of St. Louis from Long Island to Le Bourget in 1927, he gave due credit to the pair: Alcock and Brown, he said, had showed him the way. Amy Johnson and Beryl Markham, who in the 1930s separately became the first of their sex to fly the same ocean westward, were not so generous.
The ocean is officially described by the two air traffic control centers that have charge of North Atlantic airspace as a region “moderately hostile to civilian air traffic”—it is vast, there are no navigation aids and no communication relays. This means that for a substantial portion of the journey over the ocean a civilian transport aircraft is essentially all on its own. If it gets into trouble out in mid-sea, then it is in big trouble indeed. Such realizations have a way of inducing real awe among those whose task it is to ferry people and goods across. What might appear to a safely arrived passenger as no more than quotidian routine is in fact the result of planning sessions no less intense than for a truly white-knuckled adventure, like rounding Cape Horn or scaling Mount Everest’s South Col.
More than 400,000 commercial jets cross the Atlantic Ocean each year, as this electronic map of the air routes shows. Fair amounts of traffic pass between Europe and its former South American possessions, but between the United States’ East Coast and Britain and mainland Europe, it is as though a solid bridge has been constructed, three thousand miles long.
The flight I chose to examine was one on which I was traveling home, on January 30, 2009: BA 113, an ordinary, mid-afternoon, no-excitement Boeing 777 journeyman’s flight, leaving London at 3:15 P.M. and due to arrive at Kennedy Airport seven and a quarter hours later, at about 5:30 P.M. local time. The aircraft would be parked on Stand 555, it would be tail number G-YMMO, a two-year-old 777-300ER, an extended-range version of Boeing’s highly regarded wide-bodied long-haul plane, equipped with Rolls-Royce Trent engines. It had just come in from Singapore and had recently performed runs to Toronto and Sydney. It was a workhorse, heavily employed on long-haul flights, and was well accustomed to flying the Atlantic.
(There were just two unusual items on this otherwise routine January day. The first was that overnight a northbound flight from Johannesburg had suffered a serious mechanical failure over Spain and had been forced to put down in Madrid. The London staff was now scrambling to send a replacement aircraft down to collect not just the stranded passengers, but also an enormous cargo of gold, something apparently quite normal on Johannesburg departures. The Madrid airport police were creating quite a fuss, however, aware that many millions of dollars’ worth of bullion would be most tempting for Spanish desperadoes if word got out. And with a cell phone in every passenger’s hands, it was unlikely to be a secret for long.
The other oddity was the interim report, just out, on G-YMMO’s slightly older sister aircraft, G-YMMM, which had crashed on its approach to Heathrow almost exactly a year before. There was still some puzzlement over why its engines seemed suddenly starved of fuel, and the plane “just dropped,” as the pilot put it, when it was coming in to land. The staff at the center were eager to assure me that even though the precise reasons for the accident hadn’t been worked out—most likely ice in a fuel line, accumulated while flying over a patch of unusually cold air over the Urals—it was statistically most unlikely to happen again.)
Eighteen pages of briefing notes were handed to the captain when he and his crew checked in three hours before his aircraft’s departure. The departure and arrival airports were all running normally—a scattering of lights were missing from a taxiway at Heathrow, there was construction at the end of a runway at Kennedy, nothing major. Much the same was true at the alternate arrival airports, Philadelphia, Boston, and Newark, though there were some minor navigation problems for aircraft going into Boston. As far as alternate airports en route—hooligans with laser lights were occasionally causing a nuisance by pointing them at incoming planes at Birmingham and Cardiff, there was severe wind shear and turbulence on approach to St. John’s, and a strike by workers at Goose Bay, Labrador, meant that the snow had not been fully cleared from the runway, causing that particular field to be closed.
The weather during the crossing was likely to be as cooperative as expected in late January: strong southerly high-level winds at the takeoff site and until five hundred miles off the Irish coast—then clouds would set in, the winds would drop and veer to the west for most of the track, then would go back to southwesterly and freshen over Newfoundland, and then return to strong westerlies for the approaches into New York. Turbulence would be minimal; storms were unreported.
One aspect of the flight that had been already decreed by air traffic control and the planners at the airline was the transatlantic track that BA 113 should use that day. There are generally ten tracks laid out each day, five of them westbound and five eastbound—each carefully designated lanes of traffic traversing the broad width of the deep Atlantic, away from the coasts of Europe and North America, and which are shifted very slightly north and south every few hours according to the exact current position of the jet stream, and which allow the huge number of aircraft crossing the ocean to be separated safely from one another.
The westbound tracks are de
signated A, B, C, D, and E, and the eastbound V, W, X, Y, Z. The six hundred or so planes that head west each day—BA 113 being one of them—fly at even-numbered altitudes, separated by 2,000 feet: at 40,000 feet, 38,000 feet, 36,000, and so on. Eastbound craft operate conversely at odd-numbered levels—39,000 feet, 37,000, down to 31,000. On this day my BA 113—its call sign on the radio Speedbird 113—had been told to fly on Track NAT Charlie, at Flight Level 380. She would prepare to enter the critical transoceanic sector at an invisible waypoint that Atlantic aviation chartmakers had given the unlovely name of BURAK. She would make her actual entrance into the oceanic sector, sashaying elegantly into the most critical portion of the flight, at a second waypoint designated as MALOT.75
The two bodies that police the ocean at high altitude and try to maintain good order and safety for the aircraft and their thousands of daily passengers are based in Prestwick in Scotland and in Gander in Newfoundland. The first, the Shanwick Oceanic Control Centre, is an enormous complex of buildings—appropriately known as Atlantic House—situated on public housing land south of the main runways at Prestwick Airport. It has control—by way of an immensely powerful shortwave radio station sited far away in the village of Ballygirreen in southwest Ireland—over all aircraft coming to and going from the British Isles as they pass across a vast swathe of sea that extends from Icelandic waters in the north to the Bay of Biscay in the south, and onward to a line halfway across the ocean at 30 degrees west longitude.