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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.