Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

MARK VANHOENACKER is a pilot and writer. A regular contributor to The New York Times and a columnist for Slate, he has also written for Wired, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Independent. Born in Massachusetts, he trained as a historian and worked as a management consultant before starting his flight training in Britain in 2001. His airline career began in 2003. He now flies the Boeing 747 from London to major cities around the world.

"The twenty-first century has relegated airplane flight--a once remarkable feat of human ingenuity--to the realm of the mundane. When most people today think of flying, they imagine tedious routines that involve security checkpoints, exorbitant baggage fees, shrinking legroom, and frustrating delays. Mark Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot who gave up careers in academia and the business world to pursue his childhood dream of flight, asks us to re-imagine what we--both as pilots and as passengers--are actually doing when we enter the world between departure and discovery. In a seamless fusion of history, politics, geography, meteorology, ecology, family, and physics, the author vaults across geographical and cultural boundaries, above mountains, oceans, and deserts, through snow, wind, and rain, limning a simultaneously humbling and almost superhuman activity which can afford us unparalleled perspectives on the planet we inhabit and the communities we form"