Skyfaring : A Journey with a Pilot

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. 'A beautiful book about a part of the modern world which remains genuinely magical' – Mark Haddon. '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. 'A beautiful, contemplative book… Normally when I find a volume where prose style and subject matter fuse so pleasingly, I tear through it in a day. Here, I found myself pausing on almost every page' – Nicholas Lezard, Guardian