Flight Aware
Because John Dickerson mentioned Merlin on the Political Gabfest podcast....Don't forget Flight Aware, John.
I hear songbirds. But which birds? Overhead, jetliners streak to and from Europe. From which countries? To which cities? Both flights reconnoiter on my smart phone as I walk my country road. My two favorite apps hear the birds and “see” airplanes and will answer my questions, identifying both—much better than the myriad apps that just beguile me with mindless scrolling through a parallel, frivolous virtual universe. I prefer these connections to the real songs and flights going on in my immediate surroundings. No scrolling required.
I open the Merlin app, my favorite. And what a perfect double entendre. It is indeed a wizard. It “listens” to the woodland airwaves and records and identifies even the subtlest tweet, turning the song lines of a myriad bird species into a chart of sonic peaks and valleys. It detects more birds than my ears do. The finches alone are astounding. The Gray Catbird was a revelation. Ovenbirds, Red-Wing Blackbirds, Northern Goshawks, owls and Vireos galore, plus a myriad of warblers, sparrows, and thrushes, my favorites, inhabit my road. Eastern Bluebirds! I await discovery of an actual merlin.
Then I open Flight Aware app, the Merlin of air traffic tracking. As jet contrails skein the stratosphere, their sonic trails lagging behind, I touch the winged icon on my phone’s screen. Flight paths turn into flight plans, with departure and arrival times, destinations, altitude, and air speed. Flight Aware tells me what’s flying overhead in real time, anywhere in the world.
The song of a Boeing 747 facing headwinds, from Paris to Newark, is no great listening joy. But I enjoy seeing the great migratory arcs across our skies. There’s a romance to imagining hundreds of passengers admiring the view of Katahdin from 30,000 feet, or wondering at Down East Maine’s jigsaw coast line. I also hear the variety of languages and accents being spoken above, as the flight crew prepares everyone for landing, customs, and immigration. “Please remain in your seats with the seat belt fastened low and tight across your lap.”
Having left Europe at noon, they could well be landing at noon thanks to the magic of longitudinal time creep, the earth’s rotation, and prevailing easterly winds. They are but white lines behind a silver swallow, barely visible, scribing circumpolar routes in three dimensions across the sky, and two dimensions on my phone, streaming over the maritime provinces, down the Bay of Fundy, over Bangor and my coast line, or diverging slightly, vectored for a city farther west.
Who are the Icelandic Air passengers who left Reykjavik this morning and will spend the night in New York? Or Zurich to JFK—two heavy planes flying like geese, one at the front of the V formation. There’s London to Tampa; Frankfort to Greenville, South Carolina; Copenhagen to Boston. Chicago to Addis Ababa is a comparatively exotic, and long, flight joining the flow from the west. The world flocks above Maine every day. Our green and pleasant forests and mountains are the welcome landfall of American air space for passengers from Heathrow to Dulles. I have been on that plane. My nest is below. I can see my house from here.
By late afternoon and evening, the Europe-bound flights from east coast airports begin—vesper flights heading for the murmuration of Boeings and Airbuses over European airspace like starlings. These passengers will land in all the hubs of Europe, according to my app, jetlagged and ready for breakfast and a nap. They’ll be home. Or starting a fresh sojourn. I have flown on those planes too.
Birds enjoy a pilot’s-eye view and similar navigational aids; follow similar flight corridors returning to their summer haunts from South American-summer haunts. Some glide through Maine on their way farther north, like their human flyers, final destinations several airports distant. I like a rendez-vous for morning and evening songs and even detect differences in the bird species perched in my oaks and firs versus the meadow-dwellers down the road. They are site-specific, according to Merlin, each with a local niche to fill with song.
I would join the avian red-eye, below the jets but still soaring. Sure, I might ride the jet streams for a long-haul route, but I’d also swoop down and inspect my overflight terroir from treetop altitude—like the recent Evening Grosbeaks that pillaged my feeder for breakfast, and a weather respite on some grand tour. They were way off course and did not speak Chickadee or Crow, nor request landing permission. They gorged, then departed to their sky-blue highway as quickly as they had arrived—refueled, but not before being identified with my bird flight-aware. I hope they landed safely. But where? Reykjavik perhaps? What’s for breakfast, I wonder? Sometimes life imitates an M.C. Escher drawing.
Todd R. Nelson keeps an eye on flight paths above Penobscot. His books of Maine essays, Cold Spell and The Land Between the Rivers are published by Down East Books.