On several evenings last week I was doing what I arguably do best. I was sitting on our deck at sunset enjoying a vodka on the rocks with a beer chaser, nibbling on curried cashews and alternately reading about the demise of democracy on my phone and watching the occasional jet fly by high overhead.
Our place is hemmed in by trees, so enjoying the sunset requires a sternuous act of the imagination. Or rather one must infer the sunset through secondary sources such as the reddening clouds. Watching the airplanes and bats hunting insects constitute alternate forms of entertainment.
Long after our local star had fallen below the horizon it still makes its presence felt in another way: its reflection illuminates jets traveling at 35,000 feet and their contrails. It can be almost dark at ground level yet the sunset is still putting on a show in the stratosphere.
On one of those evenings it occurred to me to wonder whether there was an app that might make it possible to know where those planes were going. I’m not talking about something that lets you search for your flight and tells you what terminal it’s leaving from or whether it’s running late.
But that’s not what I was interested in as I alternated swigs of beer and vodka while consuming reports from the battle lines on Lake Michigan and downtown Portland, Oregon. I wanted to know the identity of the airliner flying directly over my house at that moment, often so high that the distant roar of its engines reached my ear only after the plane was gone.
I don’t recall what my search terms were but I was directed to an app called AirNav. It’s a global real time flight tracking app. I’m sure some of you know about it and similar apps and already have one downloaded onto your phone. I make no claims to being a technologist. But I quickly put it to use searching for the jet that had just flown overhead and was now south of me. The app informed me that it was United Airlines flight 925 on its way from London Heathrow to Washington, D.C.
When I brought my discovery to my daughter’s attention she seemed unimpressed. Indeed, she observed that an intense focus on specific objects can be symptoms of certain neurodevelopmental disorders. I handily rejected the charge though I’m willing to admit that not everybody might get as excited about the latitude, longitude and altitude of objects in the sky as I do.
She may also have a point. My younger brother, sadly in the throes of mental illness, once asked me where the plane in the sky was going. As if I knew. And most famously Holden Caulfield once asked his history teacher where Central Park’s ducks flew in winter. The question was said to be symbolic of Holden’s sense of childhood wonder and attempts to cling to it. Perhaps there’s some truth to that. If some app can reacquaint me with childhood wonder, especially if it doesn’t come with a fee, I’m all for it.
And it’s not even air travel that I’m especially enamored of. Anybody who’s flown commercial economy lately — by the way AirNav also tracks private aviation — knows that the airlines are working overtime to destroy whatever little romance remains to air travel. Yet there’s something stirring, something connective — dare I say it, something transporting — being armed with the information that allows you to know where the object flying high overhead is coming from and where it’s going to.
It triggers a vicarious thrill. Not always, of course, but perhaps especially if you’e already buzzed. If I’ve recently returned from a trip, and the trauma that sometimes entails, I’m typically cured of the desire to travel soon again. On the other hand, if I haven’t taken a voyage lately I might experience a twinge of envy.
We’re apparently on several flight paths that crisscross the sky. One is what I suppose is referred to as the northeast corridor. Another is for planes approaching Albany, NY. But unlike New York City’s crammed airspace the skies above us in the Hudson Valley are sufficiently uncluttered that if I spot a jet it’s easy to match it to its symbol on the app.
Other flights I tracked that evening included a Westjet flight traveling at 35,000 feet from Cancun to Montreal. I assume the manifest was largely Canadians returning from vacation and suitably tanned. And an Icelandic airlines flight that had embarked from Keflavik, Iceland’s main international airport, five hours and seventeen minutes earlier and was scheduled to land at JFK in thirty-one minutes. At 28,350 feet it had apparently already started its descent.
Autumn is upon us now. The days are growing shorter. Evenings on our deck are numbered. It may be next spring before I employ AirNav again. But knowing that information is available provides a weird sense of dominion and even communion. My knowledge of the world no longer just extends horizontally to the top of our driveway but also vertically as high as jet travel takes us.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
