Skyfaring

Zusatztext 40590506 Informationen zum Autor Mark Vanhoenacker is a pilot and writer. A regular contributor to The New York Times and 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. Klappentext In the twenty-first century, airplane flight once a remarkable feat of human ingenuity has been relegated to the realm of the mundane. In this mesmerizing reflection on flying, Mark Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot who left academia and a career in the business world to pursue his childhood dream of flying, helps us to reimagine what we 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, 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 and reawakening out capacity to be amazed. --Page [4] of cover.Lift I've been asleep in a small, windowless room, a room so dark it's as if I'm below the waterline of a ship. My head is near the wall. Through the wall comes the sound of steady rushing, the sense of numberless particles slipping past, as water rounds a stone in a stream, but faster and more smoothly, as if the vessel parts its medium without touch. I'm alone. I'm in a blue sleeping bag, in blue pajamas that I unwrapped on Christmas morning several years ago and many thousands of miles from here. There is a gentle swell to the room, a rhythm of rolling. The wall of the room is curved; it rises and bends up over the narrow bed. It is the hull of a 747. When someone I've just met at a dinner or a party learns that I'm a pilot, he or she often asks me about my work. These questions typically relate to a technical aspect of airplanes, or to a view or a noise encountered on a recent flight. Sometimes I'm asked where I fly, and which of these cities I love best. Three questions come up most often, in language that hardly varies. Is flying something I have always wanted to do? Have I ever seen anything up there that I cannot explain? And do I remember my first flight? I like these questions. They seem to have arrived, entirely intact, from a time before flying became ordinary and routine. They suggest that even now, when many of us so regularly leave one place on the earth and cross the high blue to another, we are not nearly as accustomed to flying as we think. These questions remind me that 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. Flight, like any great love, is both a liberation and a return. Isak Dinesen wrote in Out of Africa: In the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams I've been asleep in a small, windowless room, a room so dark it's as if I'm below the waterline of a ship. My head is near the wall. Through the wall comes the sound of steady rushing, the sense of numberless particles slipping past, as water rounds a stone in a stream, but faster and more smoothly, as if the vessel parts its medium without touch. I'm alone. I'm in a blue sleeping bag, in blue pajamas that I unwrapped on Christmas morning several years ago and many thousands of miles from here. There is a gentle swell to the room, a rhythm of rolling. The wall of the room is curved; it rises an...

A New York Times Notable Book

A Best Book of the Year
San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • GQ • Kirkus Reviews

“Superb. . . . An elegant, nonlinear reflection on how flying on a commercial airliner—even while painfully folded into a seat in coach—can lift the soul.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A beautifully observed collection of details, scenes, emotions and facts from the world above the world.” —The Economist
 
“Remarkable. . . . [Skyfaring] lifts the thoughts and spirits.” —James Fallows, The Atlantic

“Marvelously literate. . . . Vanhoenacker . . . can put one in mind of Henry James. . . . A big-hearted book.” —The New York Times
 
“Gorgeous and captivating. . . . Skyfaring artfully demystifies the fascinating technical aspects of commercial flight while delivering poetic insights straight from the cockpit.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Masterly, beautifully written.” —The Times Literary Supplement
 
“[Vanhoenacker is] an exceptionally lucid and philosophically minded writer.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“Not since Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic Vol de Nuit . . . has there been such a fantastic book about flying. . . . Skyfaring takes the genre to a whole new level.” —Condé Nast Traveller
 
“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.” —Pico Iyer, author of The Man Within My Head
 
“Riveting. . . . Vanhoenacker paints humanity seen from the aviator’s perch, woven together with a fascinating layman’s account of the mechanics of flight. . . . [He] invokes philosophers, music, history, and his own past and family to convey the sense of discovery and disorientation that he feels crisscrossing the globe.” —The Times (London)
 
“A love letter to flight. . . . Vanhoenacker slips easily between poetic meditation into the nature of travel and technical explanations of the mechanisms of the 747, and I found all of it fascinating. It is a delight to encounter someone so unabashedly enamored of the romance of his profession.” —Emily St. John Mandel, The Millions
 
“[A] revelatory work of observation, thought, and expression.” —James Fallows, author of China Airborne
 
“Flying, a century after Kitty Hawk, can seem both scary and banal, the realm of underwear bombers and miniature mouthwashes, but Vanhoenacker recovers its metaphysics.” —The New Yorker
 
“Vanhoenacker’s passionate and beautifully written book will remind even the most jaded traveller of the wonder of flight.” —The Sunday Times (UK)
 
“A masterpiece of time, distance, palm trees, frosty mornings, lofty ambition and self-effacing charm.” —Monocle
 
“A 747 pilot with a poetic streak. . . . The writing makes flying feel as amazing at it really is.” —Wired.com
 
“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 couldn’t be more highly recommended.” —Alain de Botton, author of How Proust Can Change Your Life
 
“Vanhoenacker makes [flying] wondrous again.” —London Evening Standard
 
“[Skyfaring] never loses sight of how beautiful it is to soar above the clouds. . . . [Vanhoenacker’s] writing is fluid and elegant.” —The New Statesman (UK)
 
“An author of real distinction with a genuinely poetic sensibility as well as a memorable turn of phrase.&…