Pilot recalls childhood fascination with flying in new memoir

ALISON STEWART, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR:

35 million Americans are traveling this holiday weekend, including 14 million by air. But flying these days often involves crowded airports, cramped seats, and no meals.

Still, some find enjoyment in flying – especially pilots – as British airways captain Mark Vanhoenacker describes in a new memoir "Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot.

The NewsHour's Stephen Fee caught up with the author via Skype from London's Heathrow airport before a recent trip.

STEPHEN FEE:

Mark, you're at London's Heathrow Airport right now, and in a couple hours, where are you headed to?

MARK VANHOENACKER, PILOT AND AUTHOR:

I'm heading to Sao Paulo tonight on the BA 247, one of my favorite routes. So, to fly there, it's just a real treat.

You know, we'll take off from London in a few hours, we'll say farewell to the English coastline near Southampton, and the next time we see land will be over Fortaleza on north coast of Brazil.

STEPHEN FEE:

Your book in a lot of ways gives us a little bit of magic back in flying. Why did you write this book? Was it to reintroduce us to that element of flying?

MARK VANHOENACKER:

It was. And also to recapture my own childhood fascination with flying. I was obsessed with flying as a kid. I still feel like a big kid when I walk through Heathrow, and I see this enormous 747 that we're going to fly off to Sao Paulo. I think the planes look absolutely beautiful.

STEPHEN FEE:

There was a time in aviation when you used to be able to take people up into the cockpit during a flight. Unfortunately, that's not the case anymore, but in a lot of ways you bring us into the cockpit in this book.

MARK VANHOENACKER:

Well, one of the reasons I wrote the book was exactly as you mentioned. When I was a kid I was always going up into the cockpit, I had some previous careers before I became a pilot, and I was flying as a business traveler, and I went up into the cockpit during flight.

So the book is my attempt to show you, in words, what I would tell you if you could come up. Perhaps we've forgotten just what an amazing, what an amazing thing it is to be able to move around the planet this way.

STEPHEN FEE:

You've asked a lot of your readers to submit photos to your website, and one of the things you talk about in your book is whenever we take pictures out of airplanes, you always leave in a little airplane, you know, if it's the side of the window or the wing. Why is that? Why do you think it is that we do that?

MARK VANHOENACKER:

I think it speaks to kind of our amazement at the machines themselves. That they really are beautiful machines, and they are — they are to me the most glorious creation that we've managed to put together.

They're just beautiful. I was in College Park, Maryland a few months ago; there's a wonderful air museum there, and they have some photos on the wall and exhibits. And one of my favorite ones is of — it's taken by a woman who went flying, I guess, in the 20s, and she's taking a photo of her hometown down below, and of course her feet are in the photo.

Because you're basically on the handlebars of a bicycle back then. And for her to have these pictures of the bar of the footrest and her feet in the — her feet sort of standing on the Earth. I think perhaps the image of having the plane in the photos is part of the same thing.

It's a way of really understanding that flying is almost not natural.

It's something that we've made, and we make the machines that make it possible, and that they're as wondrous as the experience they make possible.

STEPHEN FEE:

Mark Vanhoenacker the book is Skyfaring. Thank you so much. Have a safe flight.

MARK VANHOENACKER:

Thank you.