Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

Sunday Times Besteller. 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. 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 is the simple wonder that remains at the heart of an experience which modern travellers 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 has written the ideal book: 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).