ONE OLD ADAGE defines the business of flying planes as long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Moments of sheer ridiculousness, maybe, are equally as harrowing. One young pilot, when he was 22 and trying to impress the pretty Christine Collingworth with a sightseeing circuit in a friend’s four-seater, highlighted their date by whacking his forehead into the metal pitot tube jutting from the wing. Earning a famous “Cessna dimple,” so he chose to think, would be the stupidest thing he’d ever do in or around an airplane.

That was a long time ago, and a long way from this same pilot’s mind during a late-night cargo flight in the winter of 1998:

It’s eleven p.m. and the airplane, an old DC-8 freighter loaded with pineapples, is somewhere over the Bermuda Triangle, bound from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Cincinnati. The night is dark and quiet, void of moonlight, conversation, and for that matter worry. The crew of three is tired, and this will be their last leg in a week’s rotation that has brought them from New York to Belgium and back again, onward to Mexico, and now the Caribbean.

They are mesmerized by the calming drone of four high-bypass turbofans and the deceptively peaceful noise created by 500 knots of frigid wind hissing past the cockpit windows. Such a setting, when you really think about it, ought to be enough to scare the living shit from any sensible person. We have no business being up there — participants in such an inherently dangerous balance between naïve solitude and instant death, distracted by paperwork and chicken sandwiches while screaming along, higher than Mount Everest and at the speed of sound in a 40 year-old assemblage of machinery. But such philosophizing is for poets, not pilots, and also makes for exceptionally bad karma. No mystical ruminations were in the job description for these three airmen, consummate professionals who long ago sold their souls to the more practical-minded muses of technology and luck.

Patrick Smith, of Revere, Massachusetts, a fourth-generation descendant of English tea sellers and Neapolitan olive growers, is one of these consummate professionals. He is the second officer. His station, a sideways-turned chair and a great, blackboard-sized panel of instruments, is set against the starboard wall of the cockpit. Now 34, Patrick has seen his career stray oddly from its intended course. His ambitions of flying gleaming new passenger jets to distant ports-of-call have given way to the coarser world of air cargo: to sleepless, back-of-the-clock timetables, the greasy glare of warehouse lights and the roar of forklifts — realities that have aroused a low note of disappointment that rings constantly in the back of his brain.