Follow an unlikely candidate from high school dropout to a highly successful flying career. Commendation from Lockheed's Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, (SR71) as a High Caliber Flight Instructor, tops the list.

So You Want to Be a Commercial Airline Pilot puts you inside the cockpit of a modern-day airliner for an insider s look at one of the most glamorized, yet deadly professions in the world. What makes an airline captain, and how did they end up flying your plane? What makes air travel dangerous, and what makes it safe? Do you have what it takes to command a jet costing over one hundred million dollars, and, more importantly, can you accept the life-long challenge of keeping the flying public safe? This book explains everything from getting your education to passing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) practical test. With the job market only growing, and the average salary being over six figures, this might be the perfect career for the adrenaline-hunting, risk-taking, and thrill-seeking young adult. Sit down, and strap in this book will take you on the adventurous ride of becoming a commercial airline pilot.

**Sunday Times Bestseller** **Book of the Week on Radio 4** 'A beautiful book about a part of the modern world which remains genuinely magical’ Mark Haddon 'One of the most constantly fascinating, but consistently under-appreciated aspects of modern life is the business of flying. Mark Vanhoenacker has written the ideal book on the subject: a description of what it’s like to fly by a commercial pilot who is also a master prose stylist and a deeply sensitive human being. This is a man who is at once a technical expert – he flies 747s across continents – and a poet of the skies. This couldn’t be more highly recommended.' Alain de Botton Think back to when you first flew. When you first left the Earth, and travelled high and fast above its turning arc. When you looked down on a new world, captured simply and perfectly through a window fringed with ice. When you descended towards a city, and arrived from the sky as effortlessly as daybreak. In Skyfaring, airline pilot and flight romantic Mark Vanhoenacker shares his irrepressible love of flying, on a journey from day to night, from new ways of mapmaking and the poetry of physics to the names of winds and the nature of clouds. Here, anew, is the simple wonder that remains at the heart of an experience which modern travellers, armchair and otherwise, all too easily take for granted: the transcendent joy of motion, and the remarkable new perspectives that height and distance bestow on everything we love. ‘A beautiful, contemplative book... What Skyfaring gives is something we need: elevation; another perspective... Normally when I find a volume where prose style and subject matter fuse so pleasingly, I tear through it in a day. Here, I found myself pausing on almost every page, as I absorbed its detail or phrasing.’ Nicholas Lezard, Guardian **A 2015 Book of the Year – The Economist, The New York Times, GQ and more**

The true story that is Amazon's #1 aviation new release: who didn't want to be a jet pilot as a kid? Yet for most, life gets in the way and charts a different course. But what if? Here's your chance to live the dream, the real story of a childhood passion for airplanes and flight to the rigorous military college that lead to Air Force pilot wings, to years as a USAF pilot in the Pacific and Asia, then into the cockpits of the world's largest airline, and decades as a captain. Live the struggle, the adventures, the flying, the ups and downs of airline crew life from an insider perspective. An airline pilot's life: strap in, hang on--it's a wild ride.