Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot. By Mark Vanhoenacker. Chatto & Windus; £16.99. To be published in America by Knopf in June.
HOW much does Mark Vanhoenacker love flying? Consider this, poor reader, when next you are wedged into a middle seat between squalling child and armrest hog, or ruing a battery just gone dead in the fourth hour of a thrice-extended delay. When Mr Vanhoenacker was a young man, after university and postgraduate study, he became a management consultant because he judged it the profession that would let him spend most time on aeroplanes. But even that proved insufficient, and after a few years he began training to become a pilot. Today he flies a Boeing 747 for British Airways.
One might think that a commercial pilot would grow inured to the essential strangeness of air travel: how people can step into a metal box outside their flats, descend below street level and enter another metal box, this one on wheels, that takes them to an airport, where they board yet another metal box that will deliver them halfway round the world in the time it takes to eat dinner, nap and watch two films. Many of Mr Vanhoenacker’s former colleagues in management consulting probably fly from Boston to Tokyo or London more often than they drive from Boston to, say, New Haven, which is just two hours away on a well-travelled...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1yT6C7M
No comments:
Post a Comment