Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

by Mark Vanhoenacker

Overview

A poetic and nuanced exploration of the human experience of flight that reminds us of the full imaginative weight of our most ordinary journeys—and reawakens our capacity to be amazed. 

The twenty-first century has relegated airplane flight—a once remarkable feat of human ingenuity—to the realm of the mundane. Mark Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot who left academia and a career in the business world to pursue his childhood dream of flight, asks us to reimagine 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, Vanhoenacker vaults across geographical and cultural boundaries; above mountains, oceans, and deserts; through snow, wind, and rain, renewing a simultaneously humbling and almost superhuman activity that affords us unparalleled perspectives on the planet we inhabit and the communities we form.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385351812
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/02/2015
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	186,409
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

04/06/2015
In this intimate, often illuminating piece, Slate columnist Vanhoenacker takes readers on a personal tour of his world as an airline pilot. His manner is leisurely, poetic, and prone to philosophical musings as he shares his decade’s experiences as the pilot of Airbus A320 and Boeing 747 planes. He explains technical jargon and the secret language of the airline industry, discusses “place lag” and in-jokes, and grants a view of the world as seen from 30,000 feet. “Air crews come to know a life of motion, of transiting the physical miles between our memories or ideas of places,” he writes. When discussing our fascination with flight, he claims, “while airplanes have overturned many of our older sensibilities, a deeper part of our imagination lingers and still sparks in the former realm, among ancient, even atavistic, ideas of distance and place, migrations and the sky.” Vanhoenacker conveys that sense of freedom, wanderlust, and traversing a large world made small by travel, while at the same time demystifying the inside of the cockpit and humanizing the all-powerful pilots within. Readers who can withstand bouts of existential navel-gazing will find Vanhoenacker’s memoir packed with eloquent insight into a high-flying world. Agent: Caroline Michel, Peters Fraser & Dunlop. (June)

Publishers Weekly

Pico Iyer, author of The Man Within My Head
“Poets are pilots of a kind, teaching us to navigate the world anew; Mark Vanhoenacker is a pilot with the spirit, the wide-open eyes, the rare feel for beauty and discovery of an accomplished poet. Imagine Henry David Thoreau reflecting on the wonders of the lights of Oman as seen from the cockpit of a 747, and you begin to have something of the fresh magic of this exceptional debut. This is a work for anyone who longs to learn how to see again, and to live.”

Alain de Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life
“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, familiar with great art and literature and always willing to tease out the psychologically resonant implications of his job. This is a man who is at once a technical expert (he flies 747s and Airbuses across continents) and a poet of the skies. This couldn’t be more highly recommended.”

James Fallows, author of China Airborne
“Skyfaring is a beautiful, revelatory work of observation, thought, and expression. The experience of traveling through the air, which would have seemed miraculous in any previous moment of human existence, has been drained of its wonder through the drear of the modern airline experience. From his seat in the front of the airplane, Mark Vanhoenacker captures and conveys the magic of seeing the world from above.”

Kirkus *starred review*
"This pilot is an accomplished stylistic acrobat who flies—and writes—with the greatest of ease. The anatomy of an airliner and peripatetic aerial travel, as well as sophisticated worldview, combine for first-class reading—sure to enhance your next flight."

Publishers Weekly
“In this intimate, often illuminating piece, Slate columnist Vanhoenacker takes readers on a personal tour of his world as an airline pilot....Vanhoenacker conveys that sense of freedom, wanderlust, and traversing a large world made small by travel, while at the same time demystifying the inside of the cockpit and humanizing the all-powerful pilots within....Packed with eloquent insight into a high-flying world.”

The Times (London)
“A 330-page ode to the wonder of flight in the tradition of the great pioneer pilot-author Antoine de Saint Exupéry and Charles Lindbergh....Like the best pilot writers, Vanhoenacker paints humanity seen from the aviator’s perch, woven together with a fascinating layman’s account of the mechanics of flight, the feat in which a 380-tonne jet can ‘lift people and cargo away from the ground and across the sky’....Vanhoenacker invokes philosophers, music, history, and his own past and family to convey the sense of discovery and disorientation that he feels crisscrossing the globe between Tokyo, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, London and the Arabian Gulf....a riveting practitioner’s account of a human achievement that has been rendered humdrum by its own success.”

Bill Prince, GQ
“Both a manual for infrequent flyers (wherein the physics and metaphysics of time and space are for once essayed in a perfectly straightforward manner) and a skilful meditation on the glories of traversing the earth at the helm of mankind's greatest technological achievement that - yes - flies from the page.”

Giles Foden, Conde Nast Traveller (UK)
“Not since Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic Vol de Nuit...has there been such a fantastic book about flying as Mark Vanhoenacker’s Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot....What marks this book out is its author’s ability to bring a genuine poetic sensibility to the experience of flying and the feelings of strangeness and beauty that it engenders....Skyfaring takes the genre to a whole new level. I found myself turning over the corners of almost every page with excitement and admiration.” 
 
The Bookseller (UK)
“This airborne odyssey in [Vanhoenacker’s] company is enthralling, from the physics of lift and the vicissitudes of flight paths, to St Elmo’s Fire, the Aurora Borealis, pristine sunsets, and the fellow pilots he passes like ships in the night sky. Read it, and you’ll find yourself requesting a window seat every time you fly.”

Erica Wagner, The New Statesman (UK)
"Mark Vanhoenacker's Skyfaring reminds us of the magic of aviation...fluid and elegant...full of information that is wonderful in its simplicity...Flying planes isn’t just his job: it remains his passion."

Libby Purves, BBC Radio 4 (UK)
"A longhaul airline pilot whose vision is unexpectedly poetic and romantic...what stood out for me was that sense of wonder up there...a rather lovely book."

From the Publisher

04/15/2015
Vanhoenacker's debut poignantly recalls how he came to become a long-haul pilot, abandoning postgraduate work at Cambridge University for a management consulting position, largely because of the amount of passenger flying time he was forced to undertake. Three years later he leaves again for flight training. The author describes in detail his classroom instruction together with various exams for his Boeing 747-type rating before entering the cockpit as a licensed pilot. In a skillfully crafted amalgam of autobiography, avionics, history, geography, physics, and poetry, he explores the welcome challenges and rewards of his work with technical precision and uncommon sensitivity, describing, for instance, the freedom of flight, the sense of solitude, the opportunity to experience the world, the fun of unanticipated layovers, the love of a brilliantly conceived aircraft, the hurly-burly of ground crews on the taxiway prior to liftoff, the challenges of on-board emergencies, the effects of long-haul piloting on one's biological clock, and the unparalled beauty of the firmament and world's oceans as seen from the pilot's seat. Even so, Vanhoenacker concludes: "Every landing is a return from the possibility of all places to the certainty and perhaps the love of one." VERDICT A singular glimpse into the multidimensional life of an extraordinary airline pilot. Recommended for aviation specialists and enthusiasts, airline personnel, frequent flyers, and public libraries.—John Carver Edwards, formerly with Univ. of Georgia Libs.

Library Journal