Skyfaring

A longhaul airline pilot recaptures the wonder of flight for the modern traveller.
Turn your mind back to when you first flew. When you first left the Earth, and travelled high and fast above its turning arc. When you looked down on a new world, captured simply and perfectly through a window fringed with ice. When you descended towards a city, and arrived from the sky as ordinarily as morning.
In A World Above, airline pilot and flight romantic Mark Vanhoenacker shares his irrepressible love of flying, on a journey from day to night, from new ways of mapmaking and the poetry of physics to the names of winds and the nature of cloud and fog. Here, anew, is the simple wonder that remains at the heart of an experience that modern travellers, armchair and otherwise, all too easily take for granted: the transcendent joy of motion, and the remarkable new perspectives that height and distance bestow on everything we love.

MARK VANHOENACKER (b.1974) is a dual citizen of Belgium and the United States. A graduate of Amherst College, he took an M.Phil. in History at the University of Cambridge. Mark worked as a management consultant, a position that afforded him regular opportunities to stare out of airplane windows and recall childhood dreams of becoming a pilot. In 2001, Mark began his flight training. He operated his first commercial flight in 2003, from London to Glasgow, though sadly he was not permitted to tell the passengers it was his first day on the job. He currently flies Boeing 747s to nearly every major city in the world. Mark is a regular contributor to theNew York Times and a columnist for Slate. When not in the air, Mark is based in New York City.