Jet lag is part of my job as a long-haul airline pilot for British Airways. It’s something you can’t avoid but that you quickly learn to cope with: I recommend eating lighter meals, exercising – outdoors if possible – and going easy on the espresso.
But there’s another kind of lag that the speed and distance of a long-haul flight can induce; it’s a result of how seamlessly and completely an aeroplane transports you into the new world that’s waiting at your destination – into a whole realm of different smells, light, foods, views, words, vehicles, manners, street sign fonts and weather, into the universe of such details that make a place unique.
After a flight we walk out of the plane and then out of the terminal. I love that moment when the glass doors open and a gust of local air and sounds pour over you. We’re suddenly immersed. Yet even as we plunge into the different air, the different everything of a new place, we know that only a few hours ago we were just as perfectly immersed somewhere else. It takes time for one to wash off and another to sink in – more time than we spend on a plane, certainly, making in mere hours a journey that historically might have taken months, if it was possible at all.
When I described this sensibility in Skyfaring, my book about flying (I wanted to put it in the first main chapter, as it’s a feature of flying almost as astonishing to me as getting off the ground in the first place), I couldn’t find the right word for it. So I decided to call it “place lag”. Place lag is as unavoidable as jet lag, but it’s far more interesting. Even wondrous, on occasion.
My most recent vivid experience of place lag came after a flight from Heathrow to Beijing. It’s a flight of about 9½ hours. The time difference is seven hours, so it’s not the toughest jet lag by any means; but it’s a place-change that the 5,000 intervening miles only begin to hint at.
The day I leave starts as ordinarily as any other in London. It’s only the open suitcase on the floor, the laundry that’s still drying on the line, that reminds me I’m going to spend tonight in the sky crossing between a pair of ancient, enormous capital metropolises on more or less opposite corners of the largest landmass on Earth.
I have breakfast with a friend and I go for a longish run in a quiet park. Just before noon I fold a few pairs of socks and lay them in the suitcase I struggle to close (you’d think a pilot would be better at packing after so many years). I take the bus to Paddington, get a hot chocolate and a sandwich, and then ride to Heathrow and meet my fellow crew members. Half an hour later we board a Boeing 747 and head upstairs to the cockpit. I download the route into the flight computers, and enter the code for our destination: ZBAA, for Beijing’s Capital airport, the world’s second-busiest, and in my opinion one of its most beautiful.
An hour later we’re airborne, climbing steadily as we soar over familiar places: the M11 and the M25, and Chelmsford and Harwich, and the West Frisian Islands off the Dutch coast, and sea realms, too – Thames, Humber, German Bight– that are well known to anyone whose job requires them to rise early enough to yawn or smile along to the shipping forecast.
Over the Bight we pick up a tailwind, a river of air racing through the sky, just as the flight planning data on our iPads predicted. We are crossing over the waves and farms and villages below, over so many places, at more than 670mph. Denmark passes in minutes, and soon we’re near Riga, then just south of St Petersburg, then north of Moscow. We sail high above the Urals and here, officially, is Asia, though from the window you’d never know that everyone on the plane had just changed continent.
We cross the Vasyugan river and pass near Novosibirsk, “New Siberia”, a name I still marvel at. It’s a city where I planned to spend a summer homestay in high school in the early 1990s, until the programme was cancelled after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s something I think of whenever my work takes me to this neck of the (Siberian) woods: that I’m suddenly quite close to Russian streets, a Russian house, a Russian family that in only a slightly different life I would know well.
We cross the invisible sky-border of Mongolia and pass the airport of Ulaanbaatar: I can’t believe that not long after packing my socks I’m looking down on the homeland of Genghis Khan, and on the blue circle on the 747’s navigation display that denotes the airport named for him. Soon after we enter Chinese airspace. We cross the Great Wall and make a long, counter-clockwise arc around the centre of Beijing – a route that highlights the size of the city, and its “Game of Thrones”-calibre location south of the mountains, and north of an enormous plain. And then, on a bright spring mid-morning, we touch down, the solid ground of north-eastern China spinning up the long-stilled wheels of the 747.
An hour later we’re on a busy highway heading south-west toward the city. Looking out from the bus I experience something that’s still far more amazing to me than Siberia or Helsinki or the snow-capped peaks of Outer Mongolia or anything else I regularly see from the sky. It’s the sense that yesterday I was in London and now I’m in Beijing, in late-morning traffic; in a great city’s most ordinary and present moment. This, I have to keep reminding myself, is the morning that would be carrying on here had none of us ever left London, had I never got out of bed and gone to Paddington to take the train to Heathrow. This is place lag, as bad (and good) as it gets.
In the bus, Chinese pop music is playing; the driver has the radio on. Outside the sunlight and the wind play in the densely planted trees that line the airport expressway, and beyond are the steadily pedalling cyclists on the nearby paths and smaller roads.
As a species we surely evolved to travel slowly, when we travelled at all, moving over the world in sight of everything along the way, as languages and weather and vegetation transition slowly from one realm to the next. If we’d trekked overland from Europe to Beijing, or sailed halfway around the world to a Chinese port, it would still feel amazing to be here, of course. But the many remarkable differences might seem to roughly match the scale of the journey, as measured by its duration and its difficulties. It’s the speed of flight that causes jet lag, and place lag, too, as we sail with relative ease over the 5,000 miles of intervening places.
Place lag is like jet lag in another way: we can’t find a way around it, and we can’t force ourselves to get over it any faster than our minds and bodies permit. Nobody enjoys jet lag, of course, but time zones do serve to remind us of a fact so fundamental we rarely consider it – that the world is round and turning slowly in the light of a star. In the same way, place lag reasserts the fascinating differences that persist across the world even in this age of globalisation. To encounter such differences, of course, is the main reason people travel, and bringing travellers to those experiences – not to mention having them myself, of course – is one of the things I love most about being a pilot.
Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker (Vintage, £8.99) is published in paperback on 7 July. To order a copy for £7.19 including UK p&p visit the guardian bookshop or call on 0330 333 6846
