The guy going through the US airport security gate looks like a successful financial director, nice glasses, mid-40s, borderline quite cool. The security guard lifts his carry-on bag from the machine. “Is this yours?” she barks. He confirms it is. “You got a knife in here?” He asks if she means a blunt butter knife – part of some airline cutlery he carries on work trips, for when he brews up a pot noodle late at night up in some godforsaken motel.

It’s all worked out exactly how I dreamed it would as a kid. How many people can say that?

She removes the butter knife and throws it in a bin. He points out that it’s airline cutlery, so he’ll just take another on the plane. A supervisor appears, and soon it’s one of those stand-offs with American officialdom that escalate swiftly to “Sir, I need you to…” level.

But there’s a key difference between this airport scenario and most like it. The guy with the knife is a pilot in uniform, about to fly a 767 full of passengers. Yet his protest that he would hardly need a piece of silverware to hijack himself just racks up the officials’ dumb aggression further.

He proceeds feeling thoroughly irritated. But Patrick Smith, unlike most other pilots, has somewhere to publicly vent his fury at such stupidity. He runs one of the world’s most popular blogs, AskThePilot, where, in a uniquely acerbic way, he answers passengers’ questions on anything from turbulence to airport security. Smith, a punk rock aficionado, is also the author of a bestselling book, Cockpit Confidential. And he is one of two working pilots with books about flying piled high in airport bookshops – and doing wonders for the rather boring image of modern airline pilots. As will the release in the UK next month of the Clint Eastwood-directed Tom Hanks film Sully – the story of US Airways captain Chesley Sullenberger’s heroics landing a suddenly engineless plane in the Hudson River in 2009.

A hero’s story: wreckage from the US Airways plane which landed safely on the Hudson in 2009. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Smith never reveals who he flies for because, he says, it makes it easier for him to be opinionated. He has spoken out, for instance, at the glorification of Captain Sullenberger, explaining that while the pilot deserves the utmost respect, the water landing was a standard manoeuvre made possible by a major slice of luck – that the collision with a flock of geese took place right by “a 12-mile runway of smoothly flowing river, within swimming distance of the country’s largest city”.

Smith once flew bare chested because it was too hot to wear his pilot’s nasty polyester uniform shirt

The second author aviator, currently at cruising altitude, Mark Vanhoenacker, a former management consultant who flies 747s, is open about being a British Airways first officer.

His book Skyfaring has achieved even greater acclaim for its writing quality. He is regularly compared to the literary pilots of the past, such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Wind, Sand and Stars) and Ernest Gann (Fate is the Hunter). Skyfaring is a series of essays on every aspect of the pilot’s job, from the physics of getting a plane off the ground to wonderfully detailed and acute observations of life in the sky. He has an eye for detail you imagine serves him well in front of a zillion instruments.

Smith and Vanhoenacker have never met despite being admirers of each other’s work. “We often email, but I don’t even know which airline Patrick flies for,” says Vanhoenacker. “We nearly crossed paths in Ghana once. I was going to be in Accra the day after him. He left a signed copy of his book for me at the hotel. To nearly cross paths, but not quite, was a very pilot thing.”

Back down to earth: in the cockpit of a British Airways A380. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Both men, coincidentally, were brought up in Massachusetts; Smith in Boston, Vanhoenacker, who is half Belgian and partly British-educated, in Pittsfield, the town where Moby Dick was written. He now lives in New York and flies from London, while Smith commutes from his Boston home to his airline’s New York hub. It’s common, they say, for pilots to live far from their flying base.

The two pilots’ writing style is different – Smith’s, iconoclastic and witty, Vanhoenacker’s, poetic, philosophical, erudite – and replete with Herman Melville references. But their view of life from the flight deck is similar.

Both love flying, but are more in love with travelling. Both spend much of their time up-front just pondering their bizarre and wonderful life, as their passengers eat, read, sleep and dream. And both, even when not on duty, fly constantly as passengers just for the joy of it.

Being an unashamed flying geek has led to at least one awkward moment for Smith. Boarding a BA flight to Nairobi once, he wandered into the still-open cockpit, and asked the crew, busy with pre-flight checklists, if they minded him popping in for a chat with his fellow professionals. “Yes, we do mind,” one of the pilots responded in a voice he recalls as being just like Graham Chapman’s in Monty Python. “They asked me to go away and slammed the door.”

Above it all: a view from an airplane window. Photograph: Jenny Zhang/Getty Images

Smith laughs as he recounts this. He is speaking having just woken up from a snooze during a 24-hour stopover in a grim, west London hotel used by airlines.

“There are aspects of flying I hate,” Smith says, motioning towards the soulless front lobby. “This, the security, the noise at airports, the crowded planes. But I see a bigger, more exciting picture. The fact that you can get on to this gigantic machine and fly half way around the world in a matter of hours, and you can do it in almost perfect safety for pennies per mile. How is that not remarkable?”

Does he often have that thought, about the sheer wonder of air travel? “All the time. It’s why I love what I do and why I got into it. Flying’s a lot of fun, but to me it’s not the soul of the job. That’s the going places.

“Sure, there are moments when I’m bored and annoyed. But then I think back to how it’s all worked out exactly how I dreamed it would as a kid. How many people can say that? If I’m stuck in a crappy hotel on a layover I was dreading, I can still on a deeper level be excited and happy about it.”

If Smith has one overarching message to readers, it is on the extraordinary safety of flying – and that today, cramped seats and terrible food aside, represents a golden age of air travel because it is the safest it has ever been.

He started out just after the least safe period, the 1980s, and has precisely one dodgy landing to recount, when a freak vortex at 200ft pitched his 19-seater plane up on one wing, at a 45-degree angle. He admits to being alarmed then. Oh yes, and to his captain being alarmed once when he insisted on flying bare chested because it was too hot for a pilot’s nasty polyester uniform shirt.

Smith likes long haul international flights best. He opts for them over the domestic US routes many of his colleagues with children prefer. And in the off-duty periods he fashions from doing long trips to interesting places, he travels to still more interesting places, with or without his environmental consultant girlfriend. “For leisure trips, we’ve recently been to Malta and Mauritius. On the to-go list, there’s central Asia, New Guinea, Bolivia and Iran.”

Mark Vanhoenacker in a British Airways 747 flight simulator. Photograph: Nick Morrish/British Airways

Is he different, then, more thoughtful, more contemplative, than other pilots? “Pilots are hard to categorise,” says Smith. “I always thought they’d be typecast – military, strong silent types. But the people I work with represent a really interesting cross section. I know a guy who’s a concert pianist and other pilots who studied music in college. The love of flying comes from different places. For me it was the grand theatre of air travel. Other pilots’ inspiration is the thrill of flying the plane. Whatever, I couldn’t imagine going in to the same office cubicle every day.”

Vanhoenacker, however, does know what a regular job is like. He is speaking in a crew room at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and, rather sweetly, is wearing his BA first officer’s uniform even though he doesn’t need to as he’s about to return to New York as a passenger.

Quietly spoken with a light mid-Atlantic accent, he recalls his 9 to 5 days. “I’ve had an office job. I’ve done meetings. But I’d been dreaming of flying since childhood. In my management consulting days, I would occasionally load up Microsoft Flight simulator and start a flight in the morning, go off to meetings and then land the plane at Heathrow in the evening.”

But is commercial flying not rather prescribed and regulated for someone you sense was looking for more freedom in his late 20s, when he changed career course for BA’s sponsored cadet course?

Vanhoenacker is as keen as Smith on travelling for its own sake, as a passenger as well as a pilot, often with his banker partner. “I love flying as a passenger, always in a window seat. You can listen to music, to podcasts, watching the world go by and people bring you food. Actually, for me, the meditative feeling as a passenger is even better than flying.

“But when I’m up there doing a fuel check and talking on the radios and we’re sailing above an open ocean and there are more stars than you’ll ever see, and maybe you see a ship down there, or the moon rise, I realise I could never now not be a pilot.

“Maybe sometimes,” he continues, “at 3am over the ocean, you’d rather be in your own bed. But if I was given a month or two off, I’d soon be desperate to be up there all night looking at the stars.”