The twenty-first century has relegated airplane flight--a once remarkable feat of human ingenuity--to the realm of the mundane. When most people today think of flying, they imagine tedious routines that involve security checkpoints, exorbitant baggage fees, shrinking legroom, and frustrating delays. Mark Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot who gave up careers in academia and the business world to pursue his childhood dream of flight, asks us to re-imagine 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, the author vaults across geographical and cultural boundaries, above mountains, oceans, and deserts, through snow, wind, and rain, limning a simultaneously humbling and almost superhuman activity which can afford us unparalleled perspectives on the planet we inhabit and the communities we form.