If you've ever been highly tempted to make a scene on an airliner when the person next to you asks you to close your window shade and ignore the magnificent, prolonged sunset that's occurring as you're traveling six miles above the snow-capped Rockies at three-fourths the speed of sound so that he can better enjoy the sitcom rerun that's playing on the five-inch screen in front of him, there are others who share your sentiment. One of them wrote a book!
Vanhoenacker is also a 747 pilot and so is able to pepper his romantic musings on sunsets, auroras, shooting stars, and flying (flying for the sake of flying) with fun aviation facts and the accounts of the trips he flew.
There is a quiet, implicit plea to look out the window more, but he doesn't press it. Not everyone is in love with aviation; or natural phenomena. And although he thinks long and hard about announcing to his passengers that a once in a lifetime viewing of the northern lights, from miles in the air, is occurring right outside their windows, he is in the end a commercial pilot who understands that people are trying to sleep and, even if they're not, may not care (this is why captains don't announce nice things, people).
The book does not have much structure, and it doesn't seem like any research was done beyond what you would expect an airline pilot to already know. It's more like if you met at a party a pilot who's also given to writing poems, this is what he would say for the next couple hours.
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