A Boeing 747 pilot writes a love letter to flight
Mark Vanhoenacker is a commercial pilot who flies a Boeing 747 from London to major cities all over the world. Although he has been flying planes for years, Vanhoenacker is still mesmerized by the wonder of flight. He poetically shares his experiences in his first book, “Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot.”
On the scale of travel:
Pick a city on the front of the globe and a city on the other side, and imagine the distances between them are geographic but also historical and linguistic and cultural. The plane connects them. It takes people and ideas and goods and awareness between those places. That world of possibility is built into how we think of the planet. It’s built into modernity itself, but that doesn’t mean we should take it too casually or take it for granted.
On the idea of “place lag”:
Place lag is the best term I could think of for the kind of experience we have when we take a long-haul flight. There’s a kind of shock. When I fly to Singapore, the last hour of the flight is quite busy, and then we go through customs and immigration and get our bags. And suddenly we’re on a bus. I’m suddenly off duty for the first time in 16 hours, and I look around, and it’s just a regular afternoon in Singapore. Everybody’s going about their business. It’s all these people doing all these things that they would have been doing if we hadn’t flown there.
There’s this sense that planes show us that the whole world is going on at once. When we fly between places, we’re confronted with that. It’s a kind of wonder. Like jet lag, I think it’s something that we won’t ever get used to. And that’s probably a good thing for retaining that sense of magic.
On kids reading his book:
I’ve had a whole bunch of letters from kids, and I didn’t expect that. I wasn’t writing the book for children specifically or for early teenagers. I think that kids love looking up at planes or down from them, and the things that amaze children are usually a good guide to what we, as adults, may want to rediscover.
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