As a commercial pilot and best-selling author, Mark Vanhoenacker has seen the world from a rare perspective. Here, he tells us about life in cockpit
Growing up in the small town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Mark Vanhoenacker spun the illuminated globe in his bedroom and dreamt of distant cities. Streets unspooled, towers shone and anonymous crowds bustled in cities where Mark could be anyone – perhaps even himself.
Now, as a commercial airline pilot, Mark has spent nearly two decades criss-crossing the planet, touching down in the cities he imagined as a child. Mark revisits these cities month after month and year after year, and has seen them grow and change in a way few of us ever will.
Mark first wrote about his experiences in the best-selling Skyfaring, followed by How to Land a Plane and columns in the New York Times and the FT. Now, he returns with Imagine a City: A Pilot Sees the World, a travelogue-cum-memoir that celebrates the cities he has grown to love.
Here, we ask Mark to tell us about his favourite cities and share the travel that changed him.
Skyfaring was widely praised for the content but also the writing. Are you a pilot or a writer first?
That’s a difficult question! As a child, I liked to write – diaries, the occasional story, and especially letters. For a while in my teenage years I had a number of pen pals in Australia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. In Imagine a City, I talk about visiting Emma, my Australian pen pal, on my first trip to Sydney, and about flying over Cheung Chau, the Hong Kong island where my pen pal Lily lived. So to me, the connections that writing embodied aren’t so different from the ones I like to think that airliners make.
I do think that flying and writing use very different parts of the brain. When I was writing Skyfaring, I would land in one or another great city – Singapore, Delhi, Los Angeles – and after completing the shutdown checklist and making our way through immigration and customs, I would reach our crew bus and make notes. I’d write down everything about the flight that would have amazed me as a kid. In this new book, I tried to do the same with the cities, the destinations I’ve come to love best.
What’s the biggest myth about your job as a pilot?
People often tell me that they wanted to be a pilot, but they couldn’t because they don’t have perfect eyesight. There are…
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