Book review: Skyfaring - reassurance for the troubled flyer

Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot, by Mark Vanhoenacker. Courtesy of Skyfaring

On a recent night flight from Brunei to Dubai aboard the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, normally a beautifully smooth and quiet aeroplane, we’re somewhere over India when I’m woken by turbulence. Looking out of the window on the left hand side (I usually go for a seat by the window) I see that we are closely skirting a monsoon storm of biblical proportions. Lightening flashes every few seconds in different locations, lighting the billowing clouds so that they look like a Renaissance oil painting.

As a travel editor I'm used to frequent flying, and I've seen storms before, but nothing on this scale. It's just as well that I've just read the section in Mark Vanhoenacker's book Skyfaring, about life as a pilot, where he talks about the weather, how planes are frequently struck by lightening but continue flying without a problem, and how the aircraft ride the powerful air systems that circle our planet. It made me feel safer.

Anyone who might be feeling a little uncertain about flying these days, especially in the wake of recent disasters, will find this book reassuring. Though I suspect Vanhoenacker is exceptionally sensitive and thoughtful, that there are such calm, professional, caring and even poetic souls flying airlines today (in his case, dual Belgian and American citizen Vanhoenacker flies for British Airways and lives in London and New York) with such enthusiasm is, literally, uplifting.

This book resonates with me most when it articulates the strange yet profound detatchment travel can offer.

“Even today many travellers leave home not just to see new places, but also to see the whole of the place they have left from the various kinds of distance – cultural, physical, linguistic – that travel opens for them,” he writes in the first chapter, Lift. He also refers to “place lag”, “the imaginative drag that results from our jet-age displacements over every kind of distance; from the inability of our deep old sense of place to keep up with our aeroplanes”.

In this way Vanhoenacker is not just a pilot but a traveller and philosopher, delving into both the transcendent power of flight and the way that sometimes scrambled mental geographies follow you around. Also a fan of the window seat when flying as a passenger, he’s constantly curious about the places he flies over – having seen an overview, he wonders about the people who live there and the impossibility of ever truly knowing a place and everyone in it. There are musings on his father’s death, and how your sense of a place changes after the demise of a parent. For me, the death of my parents made the world starker, at once harsher and more vital – a perspective that many people must be experiencing but which one never usually talks about.

Interspersed with this are interesting insights into a plane’s centre of gravity, how much fuel is used and how it is calculated, and how precise and dynamic measurements relating to weight and baggage are. If, for example, a passenger carries an extra four books in his or her checked luggage, this will require several litres more fuel to transport them, and a proportion more fuel to transport that fuel in flight.

Vanhoenacker’s writing ability appears to have been inspired and improved, moulded even, by his job. He describes London “lying like pages of densely typeset newsprint spread upon a floor”; New York “as if a huge vase of pixels had been tipped over Manhattan” and Moscow “set on the land like some great fired wheel turning on the snow”.

Though there are some insights into his routine and the process of flying an aircraft, there’s something slightly unreal about the portrayal shown here, with its almost hypnotic focus on beauty and lack of detail about the almost squalid conditions passengers experience when flying economy – the reality of mass air travel. There’s nothing of the negative factors affecting pilots and their image – overwork, depression, alcohol abuse, peripatetic liaisons – and nothing of the disasters which have preoccupied people in recent years. There’s no mention of pollution, noise or air disasters, and when mundane things such as weather are looked at, the writing borders on self indulgence. Yes, planes are magnificent and bird-like, but this is a rather romanticised and at times laboured narrative that one sometimes wishes would go in a different direction. Nevertheless, as a frequent traveller who often gets to travel business class, I’m prepared to go with it.

• Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot is available to buy on Amazon.com from $16.50 (Dh60) in hardback. The book's website is www.skyfaring.com