Think back to when you first flew. When you first left the Earth, & travelled high & fast above its turning arc. When you looked down on a new world, captured simply & perfectly through a window fringed with ice. When you descended towards a city, & arrived from the sky as effortlessly as daybreak. In Skyfaring, airline pilot & flight romantic Mark Vanhoenacker shares his irrepressible love of flying, on a journey from day to night, from new ways of mapmaking & the poetry of physics to the names of winds & the nature of clouds. Here, anew, is the simple wonder that remains at the heart of an experience which modern travellers, armchair & otherwise, all too easily take for granted: the transcendent joy of motion, & the remarkable new perspectives that height & distance bestow on everything we love.