Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

'One of the most constantly fascinating, but consistently under-appreciated aspects of modern life is the business of flying. Mark Vanhoenacker has written the ideal book on the subject: a description of what it’s like to fly by a commercial pilot who is also a master prose stylist and a deeply sensitive human being. This is a man who is at once a technical expert – he flies 747s across continents – and a poet of the skies. This couldn’t be more highly recommended.' Alain de Botton

Think 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 effortlessly as daybreak.

In Skyfaring, 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 clouds. Here, anew, is the simple wonder that remains at the heart of an experience which 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 left academia to work 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. He began his flight training in 2001. Today, as a Senior First Officer for British Airways, Mark flies Boeing 747s to major cities around the world. He is also a regular contributor to the New York Times and a columnist for Slate. When his head is not in the clouds, he divides his time between London and New York.