The speed of a cruising airplane also means that we often do not get anywhere near a waypoint that is on our flight plan, because we must turn well before the waypoint if we are not to overshoot the route on the other side of it. A waypoint is like the address of a skyscraper that does not specify the floor. It is possible for many planes to cross the same waypoint at the same time, at different altitudes, yet each plane’s navigation computers show it at the same position. And a waypoint, for all its extraordinary specificity, is not a single place at all.
Though they are often strung together in airways, we’re frequently allowed to move between two distant waypoints without overflying those that lie between as if a driver could leave the road to tunnel directly through hills and forests before meeting it again, further along. That is not to say that a waypoint is a place like any other. Waypoints, though invisible, remind us that while pilots are not nearly as constrained by the sky as drivers are by roads, neither is our path always as free as it appears. The plane slides like an eye over the page, like a finger across a map, over everything the road and the drivers on it must turn to avoid-towns, mountains, lakes-features so low they appear nearly smooth from above. From a plane, even a wide modern road can look as slow and old-fashioned as an ancient bridleway.
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