Imagine a City – a pilot’s view of his world

Thursday, 19 January 2023

◄ UK (and Australian) edition of Imagine a City

You couldn’t ask for a more literary pilot to have up at the sharp end of your next flight than Mark Vanhoenacker. A British Airways 787 pilot he’s the author of Skyfaring, a wonderful introduction to the magic and mysteries of flying. When I was on the panel of the Warwick University Writing Prize back in 2015 I added Skyfaring to the entrants, each of the five judges could nominate on additional title. Mark didn’t need my enthusiastic help, Skyfaring was a critical and popular success. A couple of years later I enjoyed his little 64-page how-to-do-it guide How to Land a Plane. Only land that is, taking off is a much easier task.

Flying isn’t so front and centre of his book Imagine a City, this time it’s about where his flying takes him. So how many times has Mark been to Los Angeles? ‘Fifteen perhaps’ he muses?

Correct answer: Thirty-nine times, and that was then, ‘Now it’s more than fifty.’

That’s the airline pilot story, multiple visits to a city, enough to feel familiar with the place, enough to almost feel like you belong. Except you don’t, the visits have all been just a day or two, a few at the most. In his imaginative book Mark looks at the cities he’s imagined and then got close to them from those multiple visits, noting that each city has a theme, a speciality, a story, and each time he ties it back to his starting point, his hometown. Despite all those amazing cities Imagine a City is also a love letter to where he started: Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

◄ US edition of Imagine a City

There are some strange diversions along the way, who could feel affection for Kuwait, probably the most overheated metropolis in a decidedly overheated corner of the world? Mark does in his City of Air chapter, which also features Cairo, Nairobi and Petropolis. I was pleased to see that overheated Gulf City State’s recognition, because Kuwait is a city I also find surprisingly interesting, despite its glitzier and more publicised competition in Dubai, Bahrain or Doha.

Or follow the City of Circles chapter where Mark takes us to London, Raleigh, Erbil, Tokyo, and, of course, Pittsfield. I was happy to enjoy just a tiny taste of one-upmanship over Mark’s well-travelled feet because I have walked the circle of Erbil’s city walls in Kurdistan, not just observed them from cruising altitude. But his circuit of the Yamanote Line in Tokyo is a delight. After all the 30 stops along its 21 mile length include six of the 10 busiest train stations in the world. And everywhere it’s worth remembering that his imaginary cities are only a tiny taste of the world’s 548 cities with a population of more than a million. We’re not going to run out of cities to imagine.