#skyfaring

Dates - 26th - 28th August

Number of 2016 - 41 of 65

Synposis -

A poetic and nuanced exploration of the human experience of flight that reminds us of the full imaginative weight of our most ordinary journeys—and reawakens our capacity to be amazed. The twenty-first century has relegated airplane flight—a once remarkable feat of human ingenuity—to 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 we—both as pilots and as passengers—are 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.

My thoughts -.

Vanhoenacker talks about the joys of flight from the perspective of a Captain. One of the most interesting things to see is that you can still be fascinated by flight even though you do it every day.

At its heart, this is a love letter to flight and its possibilities. 

What I did find was that the first two chapters were much for procedural and a little robotic but when you got to the third and fourth chapters, and they are very long chapters, more sections that chapters,  Vanhoenacker took off in terms of the quality of the prose and the love of the subject and it was no surprise that he mentioned in the epilogue that it was these chapters that had been written first and it felt that the first part of the book was their more to pad out the length of the book, albeit there were some very interesting parts in those chapters as well. 

I haven't read much (the shame!) but here's my Halfway Checkpoint post for #WordsandGeeks! #BookBlogger

Reading Status: Page 21 After my action-packed week in Cornwall followed by a week of flu, I’ve read a grand total of twenty-one pages of Skyfaring.  Ouch.  Weirdly all I want to do when I am poorly is watch The Great British Bake Off, Hotel Inspector and YouTube videos, which doesn’t leave much time for reading! Anyway, what I’ve read so far I have really really enjoyed.  I had no idea when I…

Skyfaring by Mark Vanhoenacker Goodreads | The Book Depository Summary: Think back to when you first flew. When you first left the Earth, and travelled high and fast above its turning arc. When you looked down on a new world, captured simply and perfectly through a window fringed with ice. When you descended towards a city, and arrived from the sky as effortlessly as daybreak. In Skyfaring,…

Mark Vanhoenacker, in his book Skyfaring, describes a phenomenon that should be familiar to anyone who has ever traveled any large distance at all. He calls it “place lag.” Like time lag, place lag comes upon us when we travel faster than our brains can handle.

Here are a few quotes from the book:

Place lag doesn’t require the crossing of a time zone. It doesn’t even require an airplane. Sometimes I’ve been in a forest, for a hike or a picnic, and then later the same day I have returned to a city. Surrounded by cars and noise and blocks of concrete and glass, I’ll find myself asking, how is it that I was walking in the woods this morning? I know it was only this morning I was in that different place; but already it feels like a week ago. (page 23)

I sometimes think that there are cities so different in sensibility, culture, and history — Washington and Rio, Tokyo and Salt Lake City — that really they should never be joined by a nonstop flight; that to appreciate the distances between them such a journey should be broken into stages, and that the imaginative distance might be better discerned if such flights took ten weeks, not ten hours. But no matter which pair of cities the plane links, almost all air travel can feel too quick. We pretend that it’s normal, that London, the place where we were, the place that surrounded us in every respect, has transformed itself into Luanda or Los Angeles, as if it was not us who moved, but rather the place that flowed around us, because after all, no one could move this quickly. (page 24)

With Emily at The Geek Undergraduate jetting off to Japan soon, we thought this book about a pilot’s experiences of flying would be the perfect September read.  Can you guess the book? Skyfaring by Mark Vanhoenacker Goodreads | The Book Depository Blurb: Think back to when you first flew. When you first left the Earth, and travelled high and fast above its turning arc. When you looked down on a…

15 April, 2016

Yesterday and today I did a lot of classified stuff, but I promise I’ll tell you all about it later.

A couple of days ago I sent a fanmail with a window seat photo to one of my favourite writers ever, Mark “Skyfaring” Vanhoenacker and yesterday morning there was a reply from him in my mailbox. I screamed when I saw it and read it again and again all day. He is such an incredible person. He didn’t say, but this is how I imagine the situation: He is sitting in the lounge at Heathrow, checking some stuff online after briefing with the crew, and right before he would board the plane. His inbox is full again with fanmail, so he makes a note in his phone to answer them next time he has a little breather. Half a day later he is in Cape Town or somewhere equally amazing and it’s raining, so he cannot go for a recreational hike like he intended. So he opens up his laptop, chats with the rest of the crew, says hi to some loved ones and remembers that he made notes in his phone about some errands he wanted to do. So he ends up killing the time answering his fans, because he is awesome, that’s why. Then just as he finishes, the sun comes out, so he grabs his backpack and off he goes to the top of the nearest mountain. 

I also had another interview invitation in my inbox, but the other thing obviously stole its thunder. But I’m happy of course and I intend to rock it. 

David also has a lot of intense stuff going on, he is continuously interviewing, just today he has two and we are beginning to feel a little bit more confident now. 

Yesterday we had two fluffy visitors, but I couldn’t take a photo of them because they would not sit still for a second. Neither Cat1, nor Cat2. Carina was catsitting them and they wandered in our room, played a little hard to get and left. They have proper royal names of course, because they are expensive little fellas, but Carina couldn’t remember them, so she also calls them their above mentioned aliases. It is interesting, calling cats in languages. I was trying the good old Hungarian “ccc”, then some English “here kitty kitty”, but naturally they are used to be called in Dutch. So our relationship could not develop any further than one or two pity pats on the neck. But it is good to have them in the house. 

Today we had home made rhubarb cream for breakfast and it was a treat. And Carina lent me a shoebox for my classified project and this beautiful pair of Van Notens emerged from it. You know, this kinda thing happens when you live under the roof of a fashion designer. As foor living chez Carina, actually we are moving downstairs from the “bright room” to the “Indian room”, because some peeps booked this one for the weekend. I don’t mind at all, in fact I’m happy that we will end up living in almost every room of the house. 

It is raining today, but according to my trusty ol’ weather app it won’t be tomorrow and I would really-really want to bike to the beach, after the Saturday market of course, which has become my religion. I say trusty old weather app because when I was living in Budapest it could be trusted all the time. But not here, where the weather changes from minute to minute. In the morning, it says that rain is expected for not just the day, but for the whole weekend and next week too. Then, just as I want to cut my veins, it changes to little sun emojis for the upcoming two days. And this happens again and again in every 2 hours. 

I want to see this church too, Jopenkerk, which is also a brewery, a café and a restaurant. I have tried the beer they are making and it’s delicious, and people keep telling me not to miss the church itself, because it really is something. 

This should be the slogan of the Netherlands. 

Holland - It really is something.