Just coming to the end of this one, a book about flying airliners written by a pilot - a Senior First Officer for British Airways.
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I liked it a lot as I'm a sucker for obscure information like this; did you know that aircraft navigate along routes composed of beacons and 'waypoints' and that the latter sometimes have witty local names? There's a TULIP waypoint off the Dutch coast, SNUPY is near the Charles M Schulz Sonoma County Airport in California, and a plane flying from Australia to New Zealand will pass over waypoints WALTZ, INGMA and TILDA in sequence. I've discovered that an airliner standing on the tarmac will generally report its altitude as slightly underground, and that pilots passing other aircraft from the same airline at altitude will sometimes acknowledge one another with a flash of the landing lights. At a closing speed of 1,200 mph that takes a bit of doing, apparently. The book is full of stuff like that.
There's also an autobiographical element, which some other reviewers have taken issue with, but which didn't bother me at all. I liked hearing the author's back story and learning how he decided to become a pilot and eventually qualified to fly Boeing 747s. Presumably he's flying something else now, since BA made its last 747 flights during the pandemic. That's something else I learned from the book - an airline pilot is only permitted to fly one type of aircraft at a time. So in order to fly the 747, the author lost his ability to fly the Airbus he started out with.
I enjoyed the inside information of how the flight crew and cabin crew get along and how they spend their time on and off duty. The book is quite poetic too - the descriptions of clouds and sunsets and meteor showers and the views of earth from altitude, and how it feels to fly, are a major feature.
I might be doing the author an injustice, but I sense the input from the publishing editors in organising the material into chapters called "Air", "Water", "Night" etc. I thought that approach worked very well.
So, just a few more pages before we arrive at the terminal, the captain switches off the seatbelt signs and there's an undignified scramble for the exit. Pity, I've enjoyed the journey.
-R