![]() ![]() With the school as landmarks, it takes just half a second to triangulate the location of my old house. It’s easy to pick out my elementary, middle and high schools, so far away in both altitude and years. I check the airspace to our right and the ailerons steadily roll the great jet toward London.Īs we bank, I see the morning light as it catches on the two Pittsfield lakes-Pontoosuc (a version of the original name for the lands around Pittsfield) and Onota-that my friends and my brother and me swam in in summer, and skated on in winter. At that very moment-in fact, it’s so well timed that I half-wonder if I’d mumbled and broadcast what I was thinking on the radio-Boston Center gives us a direct routing to the northeast. As Pittsfield starts to slide under the side of the nose, I think, If only we were banking, I could look straight down on my town. Still, as we race towards Pittsfield, it’s a more personal history that moves me. He’s perhaps the historical figure to whom I’d most like to show a 747. He would never have been able to imagine the extraordinary vessel in which we are sailing across the sky (and that will shortly take us across the entire ocean, too). Before moving inland to Pittsfield, he travelled across the seven seas as much as anyone possibly could in his day. From certain angles, the mountain is even said to resemble a whale-a white one at that, at least in winter.Īs our target speed switches from IAS to Mach and we turn off the seat belt sign, it occurs to me that Melville, a New York City native who moved to Pittsfield in 1850, would have been familiar with a much lower and slower version of the journey we’re enacting. In fact, it’s the mountain that Herman Melville could see from the windows and porch of his Pittsfield farmhouse. But it is nevertheless the tallest mountain in Massachusetts (elevation 3,491 feet, plus a stone tower) and it dominates the Berkshire landscape. If you’re from Colorado or British Columbia, or even next-door Vermont, frankly, then Mount Greylock is not going to impress you. Thankfully the skies ahead over New England appear to be as spotless as those over New York.Ībout a quarter of an hour after takeoff, as we are climbing through the high twenty thousands, I get my first glimpse of Mount Greylock. As we retract the flaps, we’re given a series of left-hand turns that bring us (the long way) around to our initial northwesterly routing. Just under an hour later, we depart from 31L. “Then let’s hope it’s just as clear up north,” he says with a smile. I tell the captain about the unusually personal resonance of what’s been loaded into the electronic depths of the flight management computer. A more typical figure for much of the climb would be 3.0, or even lower, numbers that reflect our typical flight paths over the diminutive elevations of Long Island, southeastern New England, and, of course, the ocean itself. The highest figure on our paperwork today is ’4.8′, or 4,800 feet. The first clue is the Minimum Safe Altitude in the first half an hour after takeoff. ![]() Still, something is different about this flight. A quick scan of my logbook says I’ve crossed the skies between these two world capitals about 120 times so far in my career. If so, I’m a fairly busy driver of the buses that connect them. There’s a joke that in this day and age New York and London are each merely neighborhoods of the other. Indeed, KFJK and EGLL are the airports that I’ve flown between most often. So far, at least, there’s nothing unusual. I carefully lower my generously-sized coffee into that signature Boeing cup holder and start to program a route to London’s Heathrow Airport. With a larger-than-usual smile on my face, I take my seat on the flight deck of a 747 at Kennedy Airport. It’s a bright spring morning, fine and clear, the kind of day that planes (and pilots) were made for. ![]()
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