SIX

Flight Manoeuvres

TO KNOW EVERYTHING, indeed more than everything, and to transform that knowledge into natural gestures which can be acted on instantly and instinctively, but not too instinctively; to have knowledge to the point that it becomes movement of the hand, sensitivity of the fingers to instruments and sensitivity of the body to positions in space, kinetics. To know, but not to know too much, and not to be oversure of that knowledge, because error, lying in wait for any display of cockiness, is always ready to pounce. Error was the pilot’s speciality, and your discipline and chosen subject. If there was one expertise reserved for the pilot, it was expertise in error. What did you say your business was? Error, sir, nothing but error.

Words like “kinetics” would never have crossed Bruno’s lips. He would never have spoken to you of such things, indeed would never have spoken of them at all, not to anyone, but would certainly have expected you to have a grasp of them. There was no inapplicable idea in the whole gamut from aerodynamic equations to advice to navigators, Notams read at the last minute before take-off warning of possible temporary dangers, no idea at all however abstract or doltish, however remote in the recesses of memory, that might not be of use. There was no such thing as primary or secondary notions; there was no hierarchy in a pilot’s knowledge, any more than in error itself; on the contrary, error took a strongly democratic and egalitarian view of guilt. From its point of view, neglect of a fundamental principle was in every sense equivalent to neglect of a trifling exception to the grammar of flight. There were, then, no primary or secondary errors, but you had a serendipitous flair for committing errors of both types, with equal success. In life, to choose the wrong wife or the wrong lift was conventionally viewed as being matters of varying gravity, but in piloting an aircraft an act of petty oversight, which in day-to-day life would rank with forgetting an umbrella, could, due to the obvious but decisive fact that in flight there can be no stopping, be fatal. There may be perfect reversibility in space but not in time, so you could scarcely ever have a second chance at some failed procedure, or at some unsuccessful or overlooked manoeuvre. In no case would you have the liberty of stopping in mid-air to attend to something you should have seen to on the ground. It was your habit to try out the brakes as you lined up the plane for take-off, because you would not have occasion to use them again until landing at your destination and, if you had failed to perform the due tests earlier on, it was only at that point, as you pushed down the pedals and the plane careered off the runway in spite of the pressure of your feet, that you would discover whether or not they were in working order. An aircraft had something ballistic about it, you could go anywhere, but the flight would in any case complete its own destiny, and that destiny was invariably earth-to-earth, irrespective of the bodily form in which you arrived.

Bruno could never be persuaded to talk about these matters, or if pressed, would reply with a few laconic verbs in the infinitive, and that only at table where the infinitives could be spaced out between silent mouthfuls. Bruno carried, etched in his mind, a detailed map of airports, flight paths and radio beacons, with another map superimposed on it, this time of the restaurants of Italy, with the result that during a flight, quite out of the blue, he was liable to announce – let’s land here – and that “here” would be a tiny airstrip scarcely identifiable in the surrounding grass, at Lugo di Romagna, at Thiene, at Massa Cinquale or at Busto Arsizio where he was born, but never far from the goal, which was a trattoria he was especially fond of. However, even a humble broth cooked by engineers on a primus stove in a hangar, on grey and rainy days, would arouse his interest but not disturb his silences. After the meal, once the rain went off, Bruno would move out of his office like a village elder, lean a seat against the side of a petrol pump and sit there communing with the clouds and the air. You, meantime, were left to walk the deserted apron, waiting for the sky to clear, losing yourself in lengthy imaginary conversations which this impossible relationship prevents you from having man to man; you would say to him – look Bruno, when you, in mid-air, pull back the levers and say calmly “engine emergency” and reach your hand over my control column to switch off the magneto and stop the propeller, you leave me only a moment to stare, petrified, at that immobile sword on the horizon, before I set my mind to doing what requires to be done. The silence in the cockpit is noisier than a voice, but you don’t speak, you don’t even check my movements, you sense them from our trim, from the way I manoeuvre to bring you slowly in to land, from how I let the plane and our bodies drift in the search for the best angle, from how I give rein or else rein in. During afternoons like this, while awaiting take-off, I go over in my mind all the stalls, turns and spins, and perhaps I am now better equipped to attempt them, look at the loops and spins I can master now! Every evening, I am the last to leave the airfield, taking away with me all that I acquired during a day of practice in falls and lost equilibrium, or if you prefer, of equilibrium in extreme situations. I would like to be able to apply this equilibrium somewhere else, Bruno – are there such things as life manoeuvres? – but will I ever be able to talk to you about it, and if so how? There you are seated against a petrol pump like a cat beside a radiator, your arms folded, staring at the cement of the crumbling parade with roots and herbs breaking the surface all around; it is an old, tired airfield, who knows what you’re waiting for on afternoons like this. At times, in these old airfields, all those who ever failed to reach their destination seem to be huddled there, now invisible, luggage clasped in hand, waiting for relatives to collect them, exactly as once, who knows when?, those relatives had awaited with growing despair the arrival of the loved ones who would never appear. But this is only one of many, dreadful instances of never meeting again. If I had ever managed to discuss such innocuous hallucinations with you, Bruno, they would surely have found their way onto my medical record, or perhaps not. Do you ever think of what it would be like if it were possible to behave in life as in flying, of what would happen if the same reversibility could be produced in life? In flying, everything is based on the circularity of the compass, every point can be viewed in two opposing perspectives, every calculation in navigation has its opposite calculation, each reference point constitutes a choice not of value but of position, and one easily overturned; we navigate by distance from, with instruments which indicate the route travelled from our starting point, and we navigate by approach to, with instruments which home in on the destination, on the point of arrival. In flying, our teleology functions equally well in reverse; it does not designate exclusively movement to but also movement, or distancing, from, even if our sensation is not of a mere “past” but rather of a lead wire, a “track”, starting somewhere behind us and hauling us in some direction as it unwinds; teleology is that red needle I see every day turning in the instrument glass, flying about as it pursues radials in all directions, moving from a point I am at complete liberty to consider the point of departure or arrival. The needle will carry the word “to” or “from”, everything is relative, moveable words for departure or approach, and when it does not indicate “to” or “from”, the needle says simply “off”, too distant to be able to pick up any signal. I would relish the liberty of freely choosing – in life too – a beam and travelling along it, no matter whether “to” or “from”; a signal from a radio beacon can, in any case, go in only one direction, from its own source outwards, from the radio beacon itself towards the infinite, like a coastal warning light; the signal is, then, bound to indicate origin, it can never be other than a “from” signal, so I could wing my way towards it, except that, in such a case, the needle’s indications would be inverted, or as you would say, Bruno, “anti-instinctive”. North is north, although it is not the only one, it is simply a reference point, every degree on the compass enjoys equal dignity, every spot on the earth’s surface is simultaneously journey’s end and journey’s beginning, transposed from time to time, as the occasion demands. If I could only accept that all that matters is the individual section, or “stretch” as you prefer to name all journeys, and could reject all forms of nostalgia for departure or arrival; or else if only I could face the knowledge that departure and arrival can often be the same thing, can coincide. Perhaps, Bruno, that is ultimately why we fly, to gain that meagre satisfaction which can be derived, on each occasion, from departure-cum-arrival, from arriving in the very act of departure, and from the idea of having accomplished at least this. It seems that something has been done, even if that something is to be measured in mere miles. (All this has been said in so many books, by so many experts and scribblers with no experience of aeronautics, but I have never managed to apply it in life without a residue of pain and nostalgia. These are matters which can be savoured in the mind but never assimilated in the depths of one’s being; only when flying do they come to me naturally, because they are the very structure and necessity of flight, nor could it be otherwise.)

You know, Bruno, there are so many things I delude myself I could learn from here, from this old airfield; here every situation has its set procedure, you demonstrate it, or leave it to each of us to pick it up and repeat it until it becomes instinctive, but not too instinctive. Take night flights; you taught us that in observing city lights, or outlines or prominent, illuminated points it was essential to keep looking down or to one side, like bashful or coquettish maidens, so that things would appear as they are and not as they present themselves when viewed from off-centre; in night flights, you said, resist the temptation to stare at the lights. To see things in their real dimensions in poor light or at night, it is advisable to take a sideways look, to use what you call “peripheral vision”. I have no trouble doing that in flight, Bruno, but in life? I continue to look at things head-on, frontally, and am crushed by the vision; I stare at it transfixed, so that one scene, one memory or one obsession blots out the entire panorama. Somewhere there must surely be a periphery to vision from which everything can be brought back into focus, a manoeuvre of the eye which allows it to outflank obstacles and restore a sense of proportion, but for me it has never been easy to find. (I am starting to think that being crushed in that way may serve a purpose, may be of cumulative value, may make a rhythm, but, aeronautically, operationally, you could never agree.) In aviation, there is scarcely anything direct; to be centred and immediate, everything requires to have been previously adjusted and compensated for, so that if it is in the centre, its position is due to a deliberate, prior decentring and displacement. If I fly into gusts or cross-winds I must set the nose into the wind, into the direction the wind is coming from, veering perhaps as much as thirty or forty degrees off course; the direction is no longer the one I wish to follow but it is only by navigating off course that I can stay on course and keep to my flight path. And this decentring caused by wind patterns at height is only part of a more complex, careful dislocation; to get to my destination, I navigate according to the difference between three norths – magnetic north, geographic north and the north given by the cockpit compass as influenced by the metals in the aircraft itself. Each north has to be added to, or subtracted from, the others, from my route, as well as from the final number which I will follow on the gyroscopes, wagering everything on that number; like a gambler. To reach the destination, I set the nose in a wholly different direction, following an imaginary route which goes somewhere else, to a place which exists exclusively in terrestrial magnetism, in calculation and in the wind. I have no other means at my disposal for coinciding with my destination.

Bruno remained silent, a sky of dark clouds rolled over the airfield, in the hangars the clash of beaten metal provided a temporary recall to reality, behind the tinted glass windows of the control tower it was just possible to make out the profiles of the individual operators, dragging on their cigarettes as they waited. The sluggishness of the afternoon seemed to have cut activities adrift one from the other, reducing them to a minimum, leaving each one enveloped in its own specific silence, the silence of the uniformed customs officers at the bar-room door, wordlessly gazing at the briefcase to which someone has attached a computer print-out “before putting your mouth in motion, make sure your brain is in gear,” (it must be this fear that makes you remain silent), or the silence of Bruno with his arms folded and his head bowed, or your more garrulous silence as you walk up and down in front of him without finding the words to say what you want to say, for instance that all this forward planning and calculating is not in your nature. Bruno, I would prefer to deal with a flight minute by minute, seeing to all that is to be done, facing up to occurrences rather than going over each flight long before clambering on board, and having then, in flight, to be always in imagination some miles or some minutes ahead of the plane. In life, once, I knew instinctively what I should be doing, but I forced myself to carry out a slow tour of all the opportunities open to me, only to return to the one which had attracted me at the outset; but whether following instinct or reason, everything always went wrong, especially when I was convinced I had done the right thing, so it’s as well to make instinctive mistakes, to make immediate, impulsive mistakes, and at least get it over with. However, in flight, instinct is another debatable matter, something which needs to be worked on, contradicted and reversed. “Anti-instinctive” manoeuvres is your term for dealing with, for instance, a stall, when you feel a wing going down, the plane begin to vibrate, and an alarm or a mechanised voice in the cabin saying over and over again – Stall! Stall! Stall! The voice will be in English, the official language used in aeronautics, even for bad news. At that moment your heart will tell you to pull at the control column, to tug hard and keep up the already dropping nose; if you do that, you may be following instinct, but the wing will definitively lose its grip on the air, instantly transforming the aircraft and all of us inside it into a dead-weight. There are many reasons why a plane goes into stall – lack of attention, an inaccurate or incomplete mental grasp of conditions, external events, like icing – but the only way to get out of it is to let yourself fall, to defy every impulse and assist the stall, to push the nose down and go with the plunge until reaching the point where speed, and air, are regained. The same applies with spin; once you go into a spin, your first inclination is to start turning the column the opposite way from the rotation, then to twist it frantically in any direction which will interrupt the spinning motion, but this only causes the wing to lose the little lift it has retained, leaving no hope of getting out of the spin. Never use the control column, the catechism instructs, restrain instinct, the spin must be managed by the pedals and tail rudder, the last to lose efficiency in such circumstances. There are many reasons why a plane goes into stall or spin – lack of attention, error, loss of lift, an inexact appreciation of one’s own position, or perhaps position in relation to others, an undue concentration on one aspect, causing every image, every meaning, every direction to be fixed by that one aspect to the exclusion of all others. In life too there are those emergency moments when the instincts cry out for immediate, resolute reactions, moments of stall when we strive to continue climbing and to keep upright at height when the only way out would be to let ourselves drift, moments when we gaze at things full on and go for the heart when the one reasonable trajectory would carry us off-centre, towards an outer edge which, once reached, should be proceeded along gingerly but undeviatingly, and other moments when we find ourselves caught up in a headlong spin and seize wildly at every available lever, succeeding only in making the spin all the more uncontrollable. You, Bruno, would undoubtedly urge “anti-instinctive manoeuvres”! but there is, in life, no knowing whether one is always capable of doing the opposite, nor of telling whether an individual really wants a way out; instinct and non-instinct can be intertwined or inverted, and the left has its own left which is not always the right. In fact, in aviation too there is a mysterious zone, the only one with any resemblance to all this, a zone of extreme conditions, the aerodynamic zone where piloting is done by inverted commands, where the relationship between velocity and power attains a threshold beyond which, by means of those “inverted commands”, you pass to a different regime, where if you wish to climb you must push the control column down and if you wish to descend you must pull it towards you. It is not easy to understand, any more than it is easy to recognise immediately that you have penetrated those zones. Rarely do you acknowledge that what is asked of you is the exact opposite of what is wanted of you, that the real question is the inverse of its formulation; in flight, if you realize in time what is going on, you can regain control, whereas in love, even if you were capable of recognising early on that you are falling into the realm of “inverted requests”, and even if you had in your turn the power to invert your replies and gestures, neither you nor she would be any more capable of escape; there is no exit from love through inverted questioning, since to produce the correct reply to an upside down question does nothing to remove the pain or the problem which overturned the question in the first place.

We fly by mental images, Bruno, choosing between them at every moment, visualising positions in relation to a no-longer-visible earth and sky, positions which we imagine through the exercise of, if you will excuse the term, a finely honed, exquisitely gauged imagination, and there is no more to it; small hallucinations prompted by the instruments, developed one after the other throughout the flight, hallucinations which do not give rise to dreams, release or to any sort of description, but simply to a manoeuvre, to a work of the hands needed for progress to some destination. Certainly, the finely honed imagination has as its support mechanisms the panel of instruments which little by little replace the real world, the world outside the windscreen which can often be no longer seen. Of the six instruments essential for piloting an aeroplane, each one describes a “truth” directly, with at least another two doing so indirectly; each instrument is in turn of prime importance for one manoeuvre and of secondary importance for others, as happens in a Chinese game, or in infinite combinations of the same elements, or in those stories where each character knows only one part of the final truth. I speak of “truth”, Bruno, only because you insist that instruments must be believed absolutely, but it is not without a tremor that, as I break through the clouds, I switch to considering as “truths” some boxes of metal and plastic mounted on an instrument panel; it requires each time a little act of faith and forgetfulness.

Here even emergencies become a question of habit, part of a discipline; how to make something utterly dramatic and terminal into something normal and routine. The realization dawns very quickly that while it initially seems there is nothing more to be done, there remains the speeding time itself that can be stretched out by a second-by-second concentration on each individual one of the seconds that make up that time, a cramped space that can be extended by being subdivided into acts and operations each of which is worth metres in the sky and feet of maintained height. Between being and not being airborne there is a no-man’s-land of seconds, miles, altitude, and that is our territory, Bruno, there we work, there we have our being. There’s all the time in the world, you say, casually switching off the engine in mid-air, and while I sweat over it, you ask – suppose it was an engine fire instead of a straightforward breakdown? I give the handbook reply, fuel tanks off, pump off, make no attempt to start her up again etc, etc, I go into all the details of the manoeuvre to be followed, while executing a completely different one to get us out of the mess you have got us into, but do you know what I really want to say, Bruno? If it were to happen, I think it would all depend. No really, it would all depend. If there were passengers on board, I’d damn my soul if it were the price of bringing them down safely, but if I were on my own, if I had the utter certainty that I had one minute left, and not a second more, I wouldn’t spend it that way. I genuinely don’t know if I’d strive to the last, I think I’d prefer to throw in the towel, focus on the people I’ve loved, apologise to them for shortcomings rather than take my leave tugging frantically at levers on an aircraft flight deck.

The pilot’s lore has an objective, which is not the immediate one of taking an aircraft from A to B, but primarily that of producing images of the state of things and of their continual advance, as well as of mastering appropriate behaviour, which must be so deeply assimilated that it will appear natural and spontaneous in an experience where everything is unnatural. This, Bruno, is second nature to you, but you will not speak of it, any more than you will speak of anything else. The naturalness of the unnatural requires special care and maintenance, it must be constantly used, like a path through vegetation which will be overgrown the moment it ceases to be trodden. To allow it to fall into disuse means to lose it bit by bit. A pilot’s knowledge is an unending apprenticeship, and this is the point of those infinite checks which you, like every other aeronautic authority, make us undergo, irrespective of age or seniority, and is probably why everything has its own training course, proceeds to its own licence. Everything has its expiry date, Bruno, here everything has a fixed time-span, here everything dies periodically; there is no means of renewal except by demonstrating that you made use of that learning by putting it into practice hour after hour, day after day, month after month, year after year in flights, hours airborne, hours in command. The learning of which you are master, Bruno, is more subject to reassessment than any other, and perhaps the only one liable to be revoked at any time unless it is shown that it has been applied sufficiently, and is undoubtedly the only one to carry in large print its own sell-by date, like milk.

To assist me in this ever shifting borderland, I have a little book of prayers, a minor book, just as the guides and manuals I enjoyed as a boy were minor works. Every morning as I go up in my plane, I first open my breviary. Each subject in the text is arranged in question and answer format, so that it ought to be recited in twos, but it can be adapted for one, as more and more frequently happens. The one person has to be ready to take both parts . . .

Master switch? On.

Anti-collision beacon? On.

Flaps? 10 degree

Parking brake? On.

Radios? Tuned and checked.

Instruments? Set as required.

Trimmer? Neutral.

As with other forms of prayer, this one too has a part for the hands, to do with the switches. Further, just as there are prayers for each moment of the day, so each phase of flight has a propitiatory liturgy of its own: prior to switch-on, prior to taxying, after take-off, at cruising speed, for final approach, for landing, for parking, and of course, those special prayers for emergencies whose pages in the breviary are edged in red so they can be flicked open instantly, should the need arise. All praise to the checklist, Bruno, a modest but enormously valuable book, but a book which, fortunately or unfortunately, none can call on for the manoeuvres and emergencies of life.

These are the things you would have liked to say to him, and it seems to you that possibly, just possibly, this could be the right time, now, in this afternoon of endless waiting, when the barometer refuses to move to “Fine” and even a fool could see that you will not be taking off, possibly, just possibly, you could break your silence and talk to him about these things. You move up to the petrol pump. Bruno is asleep, as he has been for some time, so deeply asleep that he has not even noticed the light drizzle which has started to fall, sending a few drops coursing down his bald skull.