“At times, voices come out of the air itself, clear yet far away, traveling through distances that can’t be measured by the scale of human miles,” wrote Charles Lindbergh of his historic flight across the Atlantic. The experience was so unlike anything that humans had known before that he found himself becoming something akin to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transparent eyeball: “My skull is one great eye, seeing everywhere at once.”
In the years that followed, others—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, James Salter—would become similar poets of the air, never forgetting that they were witness to perspectives on the earth (and in the heavens) that had never been previously witnessed. Into their company, a few years ago, soared Mark Vanhoenacker, who flies long-haul British Airways Dreamliner 787s out of London to every corner of the planet.
