MV: Because most of the time we’re looking at something that’s ahead of us, almost always really, and the scale of the outside world means that these don’t feel small at all once you’re moving. Again, we’re very conscious that what you cannot see is what’s underneath you. Or even what’s just ahead of you.

DS: You wrote in the book about how pilots will say the sunsets that you see from a cockpit would qualify as the best sunsets you’ve ever seen from the ground — but you’re seeing them constantly. And there are scenarios where you would not just see one long sunset but actually multiple sunsets.

MV: Yeah. When you fly from London to Tokyo, you go into the Arctic and it’s a night flight. You leave London in the afternoon and you get to Tokyo in the morning. So it’s a night flight. But the sun never goes down because in those higher latitudes it doesn’t go down at all during the summer. So you fly into that area where it’s continuous sunlight, and by the time you’re flying out of that area, it’s morning where you are. But sometimes you turn south a bit and the sun will set. Then when you climb, you get higher — just a few thousand feet can make the sun rise again because you’re still getting that higher vantage point over the top of the Earth. And so, you can get three or four in the flight. It really makes you question what exactly is a day. It’s sunrise to sunset, or is it?

[We finished our conversation in a cab on the way back to Manhattan.]

DS: Something else you write about is the sealed-off quality of flying in general, at least modern flying, going from one sealed place to another sealed place. Is that felt more intensely as a pilot, or less?

MV: For pilots, it’s more intense because the air is the basis of so many of our calculations. The whole flight is based on calculations. Air is the medium and we’re dealing with it in so many technical ways. So where there are breaks in that cocoon-ness, like where the jetway bridge meets the plane, we often get this blast of heat, as we did today getting off the 747, or Chicago cold. To me, it’s kind of this nice reminder of what it is we’re actually moving through. Often, you get a smell of the city. In Boston, you can really smell the harbor sometimes. Even before you land sometimes you can get a little bit of a smell of salt in the air.

DS: And I guess doing the walk-around breaks that as well.

MV: Sure. Nobody likes getting wet, but I really love doing the walk-around when it’s really terrible, heavy rain or snow and strong winds. Then you come back into the cockpit and it’s warm and dry. And you know that you’re accounting for all the weather you just walked through, and it changes your calculations that cover the takeoff and various other things. The airplane is moving in an alien environment at high altitude, of course. In terms of the temperature and the air pressure, it’s alien to us. To get that sense of the vessel when you’re still on the ground is quite lovely.