Six Books That Explain How Flying Really Works

The Atlantic

08-08-2025

The modern air-travel industry goes to great lengths to prevent passengers from having to think about what they're doing. When everything goes right, the airlines' practiced, cheerful funneling and cajoling, plus the snacks and in-seat entertainment, make the experience feel anodyne and efficient. When delays stack up, luggage gets lost, or unexpected turbulence hits, passengers get antsy—and the more anxious among them may start to dwell on the mortal risk inherent in flying, at least until flight attendants provide fresh beverages. Air carriers' reliance on distraction is a shame, because the fact that we regularly float six or seven miles above the Earth is worth our fascination and attention. A better way to dispel anxieties about flying might be to explore the feat of aviation. The six books below explain the art and science of piloting, and riding in, aircraft from a range of perspectives: poetic and technical, celebratory and cautionary. Together, they elucidate the marvel that is the contemporary air-transport system and bring to life the remarkable people whose struggles and triumphs brought it to fruition. Yes, flying is safe—but it's also much more interesting than that.
Wings: A History of Aviation From Kites to the Space Age, by Tom D. Crouch
People dreamed of the sky, and made plans to reach it, long before they figured out how to do so; the word aeroplane dates back to the 1870s. Even after the Wright brothers finally cracked the nut in 1903, the development of aviation remained as much a story of imagination as of technology. Crouch, formerly a senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., chronicles the hazardous and thrilling journey from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to the stratosphere. In this sweeping yet human-scale book, he profiles the many different personalities of early flight and the machines that they willed into being, beginning with primitive early contraptions and moving on to barnstormers, trophy racers, mail planes, clippers, and ultimately the airliners of today. In Crouch's telling, aviation has never been a simple forward march: Instead, it's a field that has been filled with promising starts that turned into dead ends, acts of bravery that led to tragedy, and wild ideas that somehow managed to work.
West With the Night, by Beryl Markham
The early decades of powered flight were dramatically dangerous—but all the more romantic for it; the dramatic pursuit of freedom above the clouds seemed to attract a certain kind of reckless, poetic soul. Markham was one of those people—and she was determined not just to soar, but also to capture the essence of the voyage in words. Born in England and raised in British East Africa, Markham became what today we'd call a bush pilot, spotting big game from a rickety, underpowered biplane. Her narrative in West With the Night flips back and forth between her grown-up exploits, such as landing in the dark on a crude, remote airstrip marked by rows of torches, and her memories of growing up with playmates from the Nandi tribe, who taught her how to hunt with their traditional spear. Unflappable and impossibly glamorous, Markham wowed Ernest Hemingway, who averred that she 'can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers.'
The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe
Wolfe loved big, colorful characters, and he found plenty of them in the cadre of postwar American fighter pilots who helped develop supersonic flight—and, later, manned spaceflight. Wolfe's subjects risked their lives in the skies over the California desert in military planes, then went on to join NASA's Mercury program, becoming the first Americans in space. They quickly became Cold War celebrities whose virtues embodied a particular vision of heroism: competent, courageous, ready to lead the world to a new and limitless frontier. But in his account of the early space race, Wolfe contrasts their boy-band glamour with a more laconic aeronautical hero: Chuck Yeager, who broke the sound barrier while secretly nursing broken ribs and later pushed a juiced-up supersonic fighter beyond the edge of the atmosphere, barely surviving the ensuing crash. Skilled, relentless, and taciturn, Yeager embodied 'the right stuff'—that hard-to-define quality that the boundary-breaking pilots and astronauts ended up prizing above all else.
The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, by John McPhee
Pilots get most of the public credit for a flight's successes—but they couldn't go anywhere without the behind-the-scenes heroes: engineers. McPhee has a rare gift for stepping into the astonishing obsessions of seemingly ordinary working people; here, he uses it to immerse the reader in a decades-long quest to build an entirely new type of aircraft. That potential vehicle, shaped like the titular pumpkin seed, was imagined as a combination of dirigible and airplane. Its siren call, as McPhee shows, was sometimes all-consuming, even life-destroying. In a saga that reaches from the Civil War to the 1970s, one acolyte after another grew convinced that he (this affliction appears to target men exclusively) would be the one who conquered the engineering challenge that had theretofore led only to ruin. Did anyone finally succeed? The fact that you aren't reading these words in the passenger compartment of a dirigible-airplane hybrid gives you a clue, but McPhee's storytelling makes readers hope that the mission will somehow pan out.
Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, by Peter Robison
Modern aviation is far removed from its ramshackle origins: Today, it is a complicated intermeshing of technology and training, backed by a level of expertise that has made it the world's safest form of mass transportation. But humans and machines are still fallible, and peril lingers. A pair of surprising crashes in 2018 and 2019, both involving the same new model of Boeing airplane, shook the international airline industry out of its complacency. Robison, a longtime journalist for Bloomberg, tells the story of a trusted airplane manufacturer that switched its focus from engineering to profits and, in so doing, set off a domino chain that ended with the deaths of hundreds of passengers. The question that lingers unanswered at the book's end: Will the company, and the industry, learn their lesson? Three years after Flying Blind was published, a door plug that had been incorrectly installed in a Boeing 737 operated by Alaska Airlines blew out at 16,000 feet, suggesting that the manufacturer was still vulnerable to alarming mistakes.
Skyfaring: A Journey With a Pilot, by Mark Vanhoenacker
Although the practice of operating aircraft is best done in a rigorously routinized and automated manner, its practitioners still share a sense of wonderment and reverence at their calling, just as they did in Markham's day. Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot with British Airways as well as an avid air passenger and a talented writer, interweaves a practical account of his professional experience with philosophical ruminations about the experience of swooping through the sky. As a pilot, he's constantly tickled by the quirky details that he encounters in commercial aviation—such as the fact that, when pilots start up their plane, the altimeter will indicate that it's 10 feet underground. As a passenger, Vanhoenacker is an unabashed fan of window seats, forever agog at the landscape that unfolds beneath him, describing the endless snow of the Siberian taiga and the blueness of the Sea of Japan. 'We see place more clearly than ever' in the sky, he writes, 'unmoored and frictionless in the world made by airplanes.'