For millions of people, travel by air is a confounding, uncomfortable, and even fearful experience. Patrick Smith, airline pilot and author of the popular website www.askthepilot.com, separates fact from fallacy and tells you everything you need to know: How planes fly, and a revealing look at the men and women who fly them -- Straight talk on turbulence, pilot training, and safety -- The real story on delays, congestion, and the dysfunction of the...

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...