- Luis Argerich via Wikimedia Commons
While the internet news cycle forecasts the Pacific Northwest’s doom, Mark Vanhoenacker is quietly writing beautiful prose that is the opposite of panic-inciting gloom, which is weird, given that it’s about something many people associate with terror and discomfort: flying.
Vanhoenacker is a first officer with British Airways (for those of you who don’t have wacky hobbies, that means he’s a copilot), who somehow has managed in his off-hours to write a beautiful, poetic book about airplane-flying, Skyfaring, out now from big old publisher Knopf. It’s one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read all summer, and probably should be required reading for anyone who has an airplane phobia—with care and clean prose, Vanhoenacker explains the various technical aspects of flying an airplane, dispelling the disarming mystery that accompanies most terse, mid-flight announcements from pilots.
There’ll be a review of Skyfaring in our upcoming issue. In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from the book, that the NY Times ran through its snazzy internet graphics machine last year:
As we push back from our gate at Heathrow Airport we light the Boeing 747’s engines in pairs, starting with those under the starboard wing. A sudden hush falls in the cockpit as the air flow for the air-conditioning units is diverted. It’s this, air alone, that begins to spin the enormous techno-petals of the fans, faster and faster, until fuel and fire are added, and each engine wakes with a low rumble that grows to a smooth, unmistakable roar.
We begin to taxi. In legal terms, a journey begins when “an aircraft moves under its own power for the purpose of flight.” In aircraft manuals, elaborate charts that recall da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” illustrate the angles and distances that the extremities of the plane sweep through as we maneuver on the ground. A pleasing terminology accompanies these images of the plane’s turning limbs: tail radius and steering angle and the wingtip that swings the largest arc.
Read the whole thing here.
That is a CB in the background of that photo, which Weather Trained folks know as a Cumulonimbus Cloud,which are responsible for Thunderstorms and hail, etc.
Pilots try to avoid flying through these because the winds within each cell are all crazy vertical up and down….
The more you know…
I was also wondering why the plane in the photo, clearly a long way above the ground, still has its wheels down?
Because it’s photoshopped?