Skyfaring

A poetic and nuanced exploration of the human experience of flight that reminds us of the full imaginative weight of our most ordinary journeysand reawakens our capacity to be amazed.The twenty-first century has relegated airplane flighta once remarkable feat of human ingenuityto 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 weboth as pilots and as passengersare 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.