Over the last century air travel has evolved from a high-risk experiment involving a few visionary pioneers to an efficient--and often irritating--means for distributing masses of people to the far reaches of the globe. Whether gridlock in the sky signals progress is debatable. But what becomes clear upon reading the letters, diaries, memoirs, and fictional stories of pilots, flight attendants, crew members, and passengers included in Flight Patterns is that flight requires a state of suspension. This suspension is of real life as much as of disbelief (not to mention of an unwieldy mass of metal and circuitry), and during the hundred-year history of human air travel, it has yielded writing that is, by turns, heroic, dreamy, subversive, and utterly dire. This anthology traces this trajectory from the early letters and memoirs of Wilbur and Orville Wright, and Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, to the diaries of the headstrong and supremely ambitious Amelia Earhart, to Mary Lee Settle's firsthand account of a control-tower mishap in wartime England. Antoine de Saint-Exupery's heroism gives way to the darkly magical storytelling of Roald Dahl, and the spare, elegiac prose of master stylist James Salter. More recent stories by Erica Jong, Mary Gaitskill, Thomas Beller, Mike Albo, Meghan Daum, Maxine Swann, and David Sedaris examine an array of contemporary subjects, from the addictiveness of mile-high sex, to the phenomenon of gay flight attendants, to etiquette for cramped seating and accounts of racial profiling post-9/11. A must for every airport bookstore, Flight Patterns promises an entertaining refuge for frequent fliers, and a gateway to dreams for nighttime readers. These writingsexude the primal fear and cool perspective that can only come from seeing the world--and one's own life--from a great distance. Flight Patterns renders airplane travel a time capsule of modern life.

Over the last century air travel has evolved from a high-risk experiment involving a few visionary pioneers to an efficient—and often irritating—means for distributing masses of people to the far reaches of the globe. During the hundred-year history of human air travel, it has yielded writing that is, by turns, heroic, dreamy, subversive, and utterly dire. This anthology traces this trajectory from the early letters and memoirs of Wilbur and Orville Wright, and Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, to the diaries of Amelia Earhart. Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s heroism gives way to the darkly magical storytelling of Roald Dahl, and the spare, elegiac prose of master stylist James Salter. More recent stories by Erica Jong, Mary Gaitskill, Thomas Beller, Mike Albo, Maxine Swann, and David Sedaris examine an array of contemporary subjects, from the addictiveness of mile-high sex, to etiquette for cramped seating and accounts of racial profiling post–9/11. Flight Patterns promises an entertaining refuge for frequent fliers, and a gateway to dreams for nighttime readers. These writings exude the primal fear and cool perspective that can only come from seeing the world—and one’s own life—from a great distance. Flight Patterns renders airplane travel a time capsule of modern life.