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Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot (Vintage Departures) Paperback – May 3, 2016
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A New York Times Notable Book • "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
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, 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 and reawakening our capacity to be amazed.
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateMay 3, 2016
- Dimensions5.28 x 0.82 x 7.97 inches
- ISBN-109780804169714
- ISBN-13978-0804169714
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“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.” —The Spectator
“Vanhoenacker makes [flying] wondrous again.” —London Evening Standard
“A skilful meditation on the glories of traversing the earth at the helm of mankind’s greatest technological achievement. . . . You’ll quickly find yourself in thrall to Vanhoenacker’s marvellous prose.” —GQ (UK)
“Through prose as passionate and erudite as it is informative, [Vanhoenacker] describes not merely the mechanical workings of flight, but will rekindle, in those who care to listen, a lost appreciation for the marvel of global air travel.” —Patrick Smith, author of Cockpit Confidential
About the Author
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.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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 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 the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space.” When aviation began, it was worth watching for its own sake; it was entertainment, as it still is for many children on their early encounters with it.
Many of my friends who are pilots describe airplanes as the first thing they loved about the world. When I was a child I used to assemble model airplanes and hang them in my bedroom, under a ceiling scattered with glow-in-the-dark stars, until the day skies were hardly less busy than Heathrow’s, and at night the outlines of the dark jets crossed against the indoor constellations. I looked forward to each of my family’s occasional airplane trips with an enthusiasm that rarely had much to do with wherever we were going. I spent most of my time at Disney World awaiting the moment we would board again the magical vessel that had brought us there.
At school nearly all my science projects were variations on an aerial theme. I made a hot-air balloon from paper, and sanded wings of balsa wood that jumped excitedly in the slipstream from a hairdryer, as simply as if it were not air but electricity that had been made to flow across them. The first phone call I ever received from someone other than a friend or relative came when I was thirteen. My mom passed me the telephone with a smile, telling me that a vice president from Boeing had asked to speak with me. He had received my letter requesting a videotape of a 747 in flight, to show as part of a science project about that airplane. He was happy to help; he wished only to know whether I wanted my 747 to fly in VHS or Betamax format.
I am the only pilot in my family. But all the same, I feel that imaginatively, at least, airplanes and flying were never far from home. My father was completely enthralled by airplanes—the result of his front-row seat on the portion of the Second World War that took place in the skies above his childhood home in West Flanders. He learned the shapes of the aircraft and the sounds of their engines. “The thousands of planes in the sky were too much competition for my schoolbooks,” he later wrote. In the 1950s, he left Belgium to work as a missionary in the Belgian Congo, where he first flew in a small airplane. Then he sailed to Brazil, where in the 1960s he was one of surely not very many priests with a subscription to Aviation Week magazine. Finally he flew to America, where he met my mother, went to business school, and worked as a manager in mental health services. Airplanes fill his old notes and slides.
My mother, born under the quieter skies of rural Pennsylvania, worked as a speech therapist and had no particular interest in aviation. Yet I feel she was the one who best understood my attachment to the less tangible joys of flight: the old romance of all journeys, which she gave to my brother and me in the form of stories like Stuart Little and The Hobbit, but also a sense of what we see from above or far away—the gift, the destination, that flying makes not of a distant place but of our home. Her favorite hymn was “For the Beauty of the Earth,” a title, at least, that we agreed might be worth printing on the inside of airplane window blinds.
My brother is not a pilot. His love is not for airplanes but for bicycles. His basement is full of bikes that are works in progress, that he’s designing and assembling from far-gathered parts, for me or for a grateful friend. When it comes to his bike frames, he is as obsessed with lightness as any aeronautical engineer. He likes to make and fix bikes even more than he likes to ride them, I think.
If I see my brother working on one of his two-wheeled creations, or notice that he’s reading about bikes on his computer while I am next to him on the couch reading about airplanes, I may remember that the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics, and that their skyfaring skills began with wheels, a heritage that suddenly becomes clear when you look again at their early airplanes. When I see pictures of such planes I think, if I had to assemble anything that looked like this, I would start by calling on the skills of my brother—even though there was the time I got him in trouble with our parents for skipping his chores, and so he taped firecrackers to one of my model airplanes and lit the fuses and waited just the right number of seconds before throwing the model from an upstairs window, in a long arc over the backyard.
As a teenager I took a few flying lessons. I thought that I might one day fly small airplanes as a hobby, on weekend mornings, an aside to some other career. But I don’t remember having a clear wish to become an airline pilot. No one at school suggested the career to me. No pilots lived in our neighborhood; I don’t know if there were any commercial pilots at all in our small town in western Massachusetts, which was some distance from any major airport. My dad was an example of someone who enjoyed airplanes whenever he encountered them, but who had decided not to make them his life’s work. I think the main reason I didn’t decide earlier to become a pilot, though, is because I believed that something I wanted so much could never be practical, almost by definition.
In high school I spent my earnings from a paper route and restaurant jobs on summer homestay programs abroad, in Japan and Mexico. After high school I stayed in New England for college but also studied in Belgium, briefly reversing the journey my father had made. After college I went to Britain to study African history, so that I could live in Britain and, I hoped, in Kenya. I left that degree program when I finally realized that I wanted to become a pilot. To repay my student loans and save the money I expected to need for flight training, I took a job in Boston, in the field—management consulting—that I thought would require me to fly most often.
In high school I certainly wanted to see Japan and Mexico, and to study Japanese and Spanish. But really, what attracted me most to such adventures was the scale of the airplane journeys they required. It was the possibility of flight that most drew me to far-off summer travels, to degree programs in two distant lands, to the start of the most literally high-flying career I could find in the business world, and at last—because none of even those endeavors got me airborne nearly often enough—to a career as a pilot.
When I was ready to start my flight training, I decided to return to Britain. I liked many aspects of the country’s historic relationship with aviation, its deep tradition of air links with the whole world, and the fact that even some of the shortest flights from Britain are to places so very different from it. And, not least, I liked the idea of living near the good friends I’d made as a postgraduate there.
I began to fly commercially when I was twenty-nine. I first flew the Airbus A320 series airliners, a family of narrow-bodied jets used on short- to medium-distance flights, on routes all around Europe. I’d be woken by an alarm in the 4 a.m. darkness of Helsinki or Warsaw or Bucharest or Istanbul, and there would be a brief bleary moment, in the hotel room whose shape and layout I’d already forgotten in the hours since I’d switched off the light, when I’d ask myself if I’d only been dreaming that I became a pilot. Then I would imagine the day of flying ahead, crossing back and forth in the skies of Europe, almost as excitedly as if it was my first day. I now fly a larger airplane, the Boeing 747. On longer flights we carry additional pilots so that each of us can take a legally prescribed break, a time to sleep and dream, perhaps, while Kazakhstan or Brazil or the Sahara rolls steadily under the line of the wing.
Frequent travelers, in the first hours or days of a trip, may be familiar with the experience of jet lag or a hotel wake-up call summoning them from the heart of night journeys they would otherwise have forgotten. Pilots are often woken at unusual points in their sleep cycles and perhaps, too, the anonymity and nearly perfect darkness of the pilot’s bunk form a particularly clean slate for the imagination. Whatever the reason, I now associate going to work with dreaming, or at least, with dreams recalled only because I am in the sky.
—
A chime sounds in the darkness of the 747’s bunk. My break is over. I feel for the switch that turns on a pale-yellow beam. I change into my uniform, which has been hanging on a plastic peg for something like 2,000 miles. I open the door that leads from the bunk to the cockpit. Even when I know it’s coming—and it’s frequently hard to know, depending as it does on the season, the route, the time, and the place—the brightness always catches me off guard. The cockpit beyond the bunk is blasted with a directionless daylight so pure and overwhelming, so alien to the darkness I left it in hours ago and to the gloom of the bunk, that it is like a new sense.
As my eyes adjust, I look forward through the cockpit windows. At this moment it’s the light itself, rather than what it falls upon, that is the essential feature of the earth. What the light falls upon is the Sea of Japan, and far across this water, on the snowcapped peaks of the island nation we are approaching. The blueness of the sea is as perfect as the sky it reflects. It is as if we are slowly descending over the surface of a blue star, as if all other blues are to be mined or diluted from this one.
As I move forward in the cockpit to my seat on the right side of it, I think briefly back to the trip I made to Japan as a teenager, about two decades ago, and to the city this plane left only yesterday, though yesterday isn’t quite the right word for what preceded a night that hardly deserves the name, so quickly was it undone by our high latitudes and eastward speed.
I remember that I had an ordinary morning in the city. I went to the airport in the afternoon. Now that day has turned away into the past, and the city, London, lies well beyond the curve of the planet.
As I fasten my seat belt I remember how we started the engines yesterday. How the sudden and auspicious hush fell in the cockpit as the airflow for the air-conditioning units was diverted; how air alone began to spin the enormous techno-petals of the fans, spin them and spin them, faster and faster, until fuel and fire were added, and each engine woke with a low rumble that grew to a smooth and unmistakable roar—the signature of one of our age’s most perfect means of purifying and directing physical power.
In legal terms a journey begins when “an aircraft moves under its own power for the purpose of flight.” I remember the aircraft that moved ahead of us for this purpose and lifted ahead of us into the London rain. As that preceding aircraft taxied into position its engines launched rippling gales that raced visibly over the wet runway, as if from some greatly speeded-up video recording of the windswept surface of a pond. When takeoff thrust was set the engines heaved this water up in huge gusting night-gray cones, new clouds cast briefly skyward.
I remember our own takeoff roll, an experience that repetition hasn’t dulled: the unfurling carpet of guiding lights that say here, the voice of the controller that says now; the sense, in the first seconds after the engines reach their assigned power and we begin to roll forward, that this is only a curious kind of driving down an equally curious road. But with speed comes the transition, the gathering sense that the wheels matter less, and the mechanisms that work on the air—the control surfaces on the wings and the tail—more. We feel the airplane’s dawning life in the air clearly through the controls, and with each passing second the jet’s presence on the ground becomes more incidental to how we direct its motion. Yesterday we were flying on the earth, long before we left it.
On every takeoff there is a speed known as V1. Before this speed we have enough room left ahead of us on the runway to stop the takeoff. After this speed we may not. Thus committed to flight, we continued for some time along the ground, gathering still more speed to the vessel. A few long seconds after V1 the jet reached its next milestone of velocity and the captain called: “Rotate.” As the lights of the runway started to alternate red and white to indicate its approaching end, as the four rivers of power that summed to nearly a quarter of a million pounds of thrust unfurled over the runway behind us, I lifted the nose.
As if we had only pulled out of a driveway, I turned right, toward Tokyo.
London, then, was on my side of the cockpit. The city grew bigger before it became smaller. From above, still climbing, you realize that this is how a city becomes its own map, how a place becomes whole before your eyes, how from an airplane the idea of a city and the image of a city itself can overlay each other so perfectly that it’s no longer possible to distinguish between them. We followed London’s river, that led the vessels of a former age from their docks to the world, as far as the North Sea. Then the sea turned, and Denmark, Sweden, Finland passed beneath us, and night fell—the night that both began and ended over Russia. Now I’m in the new day’s blue northwest of Japan, waiting for Tokyo to rise as simply as the morning.
I settle myself into my sheepskin-covered seat and my particular position above the planet. I blink in the sun, check the distance of my hands and feet from the controls, put on a headset, adjust the microphone. I say good morning to my colleagues, in the half-ironic sense that long-haul pilots will know well, that means, on a light-scrambling journey, I need a minute to be sure where it is morning, and for whom—whether for me, or the passengers, or the place below us on the earth, or perhaps at our destination. I ask for a cup of tea. My colleagues update me on the hours I was absent; I check the computers, the fuel gauges. Small, steady green digits show our expected landing time in Tokyo, about an hour from now. This is expressed in Greenwich Mean Time. In Greenwich it is still yesterday. Another display shows the remaining nautical miles of flight, a number that drops about one mile every seven seconds. It is counting down to the largest city that has ever existed.
Product details
- ASIN : 0804169713
- Publisher : Vintage; Reprint edition (May 3, 2016)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780804169714
- ISBN-13 : 978-0804169714
- Item Weight : 10.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.28 x 0.82 x 7.97 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #94,556 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #77 in Piloting & Flight Instruction
- #147 in Travel Writing Reference
- #247 in Travelogues & Travel Essays
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What makes this an interesting read is that the pilot shares his personal relationship with flying and traveling, going into his family history and past flights and trips, as well as reporting on his time in the cockpit. In fact, for the first two chapters I was thinking that this would be more an autobiography and travelogue than what I expected it to be.
In the end, it is a nicely balanced book; you get to know the author and, like him (or at least I did) and you get to know more about what happens in the front of the plane as well as how the pilots spend their time on the ground.
A good read, As a very frequent flier (many years of 100k-350k miles) I would have liked there to have been a bit more mechanics, but I was satisfied with what was there. I learned a bit more about what was happening as I slept at 40,000 feet. Capt. Vanhoenacker is obviously well educated, has a feel for the arts and expresses himself in a manner that is pleasant to read as well as educational.
I'm not sure how I came to find out about this book, but am so happy I did. While I have no training whatsoever as a pilot, I've spent quite a lot of time traveling for business and leisure so have spent a fair share of time in planes throughout the world. I always choose an aisle seat, and get bummed when I'm not in one. I love pressing my face against the window as I look at my departing location while the plane climbs into the air, peer out 6-8 miles above the earth while land unfolds far below (so many places I'll never put my feet to ground) and finally looking for familiar or unfamiliar landmarks or terrain as we descend to our destination. I've always been mesmerized by the ingenuity of the human mind that enabled us to "conquer" thousand of years of human aspiration.
The marvel of watching a plane, no less one as big as a 747 or A380, roar down the runaway and lift into the air to take you from one location or part of the world to another, often completely different from where you began your journey --- "place lag" as Vanhoencker terms it. Vanhoenacker writes with a passion and love for flying, combining a "behind the scenes" look at what it is like to be a pilot along with the physics and science of flight. He shares so many unique and interesting anecdotes along the way that you wish you could spend half a day chatting with him to hear more as he undoubtedly left others out to keep the book at a manageable length. If you hate flying or planes, this is definitely a book to ignore. For all others with even a unique or passing interest in either of those things, you'll find this book extremely rewarding. Bon Voyage!
Vanhoenacker expresses some kinship to mariners, an environment with which I am much more familiar. In both, we experience the world in ways that those who sit at home may only slightly comprehend. It is good to know that someone in the cockpit is not just looking at gauges and manuals. The author shares and illuminates the beauty and complexity of our world as seen and experienced from some 40,000 feet above the surface. A life leapfrogging the continents has its merits and shortcomings. The writer candidly concedes that just flying to a city frequently doesn't mean you know it. There is an affection for those who follow this vagabond calling; a responsibility to those who rely on their mastery to transit safely on important journeys; and perhaps a deeper appreciation of where one ultimately calls home.
This is a book for those of us who are exhilarated by every flight and don't view the experience as merely a bus ride in the air.
Top reviews from other countries
She was confident, fluent and reassuring. She expected to turn on the seat belt signs over Greenland; otherwise, the flight would be smooth to Vancouver. I sat back in my seat and read my book as I hadn't managed to bag a window seat.
As we were taxiing to the arrival gate, Captain Glen introduced himself as the instructor pilot and announced that after 22 years as a first officer, he’d just promoted Jennifer to the full rank of captain. The entire plane erupted in spontaneous applause. And as we got off the plane, Captain Jennifer greeted us.
It seemed only fitting then that on the day Captain Jennifer joined an elite group of flyers, I finished reading Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot.
Part career memoir, part travel journal and, at times, pure poetry, the book balances the technical aspects of flying with a sense of wonderment and joy at seeing the world from the flight deck. The author riffs on the history of aviation and navigation, comparing modern-day flying with centuries-old seafaring. I’d recommend this book to armchair travellers, nervous flyers and people like me who spend a fair bit of time staring out of plane windows.