Skyfaring Quotes

“The journey, of course, is not quite the destination. Not even for pilots. Still, we are lucky to live in an age in which many of us, on our busy way to wherever we are going, are given these hours in the high country, when lightness is lent to us, where the volume of our home is opened and a handful of our oldest words – ‘journey’, ‘road’, ‘wing’, ‘water’; ‘earth’ and ‘air’, ‘sky’ and ‘city’ and ‘night’ – are made new. From aeroplanes we occasionally look up and are briefly held by the stars or the firmament of blue. But mostly we look down, caught by the sudden gravity of what we’ve left, and by thoughts of reunion, drifting like clouds over the half-bright world.”
― Mark Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

“Jet lag results from our rapid motion between time zones, across the lines that we have drawn on the earth that equate light with time, and time with geography. Yet our sense of place is scrambled as easily as our body’s circadian rhythms. Because jet lag refers only to a confusion of time, to a difference measured by hours, I call this other feeling ‘place lag’: the imaginative drag that results from our jet-age displacements over every kind of distance; from the inability of our deep old sense of place to keep up with our aeroplanes.”
― Mark Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

“We might picture what we learned once in school but now may only rarely consider: the earth floating in the light of the sun. Using an apple and a flashlight can help remind us that at every moment the back of the planet is dark and the front is light.”
― Mark Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

“whether the achievements of their field are created or discovered; I ask myself this about airspeed. I wish I could remember, before I learned to fly, what I might have guessed indicated airspeed actually meant. Why, I might have asked myself, do we need to specify airspeed? Isn’t speed enough? And what about that indicated, which makes the term sound both fuzzy and”
― Mark Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

“Wherever you go, there you are,”
― Mark Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

“And a person who is looking for something doesn’t travel very fast.” When”
― Mark Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

“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. We”
― Mark Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

“London, then, was on my side of the cockpit. The city grew bigger before it became smaller. From above, still climbing, you realise that this is how a city becomes its own map, how a place becomes whole before your eyes, how from an aeroplane the idea of a city and the image of a city itself can overlay each other so perfectly that it’s no longer possible to distinguish between them. We”
― Mark Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

“We may be pleased by the still-glinting wings of an airliner high above us, leaving a contrail soaked in crimson light, while at street level the sun has already set. We see the plane we are not on, bound for a place we are not, in the last light of a day that has already left us.”
― Mark Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

“In his whole life the spheres of home and work will never again meet this way, on a crackling electric bridge in the blue. Whenever”
― Mark Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

“Many components begin to test themselves; warnings arise then quickly clear. Electrons begin to flow through the nerve-wires, hurrying light to the distant wingtips or returning with news of the quantity of fuel on board or the present outside temperature, as the plane awakens to its purpose. My”
― Mark Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

“People become quickly accustomed to peculiar aspects of any job. I try hard to remember that this is an unusual experience of the world – to have stood on the earth there, then there on it and there; then suddenly to find myself alone on an ordinary afternoon, quietly washing it from my shoes.”
― Mark Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot