Product Description

An illustrated guide, in both book and CD-ROM, of landscapes seen from commercial airplane windows across the United States.

This is a guide to what an airline passenger sees from his seat while flying over the United States. Through its ingenious construction and a map of preferred flight paths, it's easy to find those pages that correspond to whatever flight a passenger happens to be on, and then to identify features that can be seen from the air. The book marries geology, natural history, and human history for a glorious portrait of the continent, from the Atlantic City Boardwalk to Mount St. Helens.

Each two-page spread features an aerial photo with captions identifying features passengers will see and an essay interpreting the features. Each chapter is a Flight Corridor, with pages sequenced to follow a trip from takeoff to landing. Because many flight paths overlap, the fifteen corridors cover the forty most heavily traveled flight segments in the continental United States, plus many others. In many regions of the country, readers will have a new page to read about every twenty minutes. The entire book is also on the included CD-ROM, which can easily be used on a laptop in the air.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60995 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780618706037
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Daniel Mathews is a writer who has always been enamored of views from mountains. He is the author of Cascade-Olympic Natural History and Rocky Mountain Natural History.

James S. Jackson is a geologist and adjunct professor of geology at Portland State University. He has flown more than a million miles on commercial flights.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
We've written this guide for the many fliers like ourselves who secretly harbor
a tingle of excitement as flight time approaches—so long as we fly in
daylight, with auspicious weather and a window seat. Well, yes, it's also for
you, you of little faith who gave up on window seats years ago, perhaps
because the views had all merged hazily, their rivers unnameable, their
mysteries intractable. Here we name places, unearth histories, and unravel
landscape puzzles. Welcome aboard.

Paths Planes Fly
Articles in this guide are sorted into 14 corridors—assemblages of more or
less overlapping flight paths. These flight paths embrace nearly all the 60
most heavily traveled city pairs in the United States.
If your flight is not on one of these corridors, look it up in the Index
of Flights, page 343. You will find suggested sequences of articles for many
trips that aren't so cluttered with contrails. But you'll have to skip around from
corridor to corridor (of the guide, not of the plane).
Maps on the preceding pages of this guide largely reflect a recent
edition of the Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) Preferred Routes published by the
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Pilots frequently wish to depart from
the preferred route to save fuel or to avoid bad weather and file a request to
take a different specified path. The FAA grants the majority of these
requests.
Preferred routes commonly, but not always, lump the airports
within a metro area together, as this guide does. Different preferred routes are
sometimes given for different regional airports, for different times of day, or for
different aircraft. Flights east from Oakland, California, for example, are more
likely to take a northerly option, whereas flights from San Francisco and
especially San Jose more often take a southerly option. (We give more
examples of such correlations in the corridor introductions.)
While the plane is near the departure and destination airports,
pilots are directed in real time by local air traffic controllers. For many city
pairs, the FAA publishes no preferred routes. By tracking flights online, we
were able to find customary routes, as well as to select among FAA preferred
routes to find the ones most often followed. Our maps present the results of
our investigations.
Each city pair typically has at least two flight paths—one for each
direction—and they're often pretty far apart. Some city pairs, especially the
longest and busiest routes, have four or more preferred or customary paths.
New York–Los Angeles is an extreme example, with paths wandering farther
apart than the north-to-south extent of Colorado. (The most northerly New
York–Los Angeles route that we have tracked repeatedly crosses a big
corner of Wyoming; the most southerly one crosses a small corner of
Oklahoma.) For that reason, we divide New York–Los Angeles into two
corridors. If you take the northerly one, you are likely to fly over or very close
to Chicago and Las Vegas, so it makes sense to include New York–Chicago,
Chicago–Las Vegas, and other segments in the same corridor. If you take
the southerly one, you are likely to fly near Philadelphia and Indianapolis,
which join that corridor.

Why Planes Don't Fly Straight
For many decades, air navigation worked by triangulating between radio
beacons (Navigational Aids, or NAVAIDs) set up for this purpose by the FAA
and the military. the easiest way to keep planes on precise routes and avoid
midair collisions was to have the planes proceed directly from beacon to
beacon. the FAA preferred routes are expressed as sequences of NAVAIDs.
Today, it is possible for planes to navigate precisely using Global
Positioning System (GPS) satellites. But to meet safety requirements for
planes, GPS instruments must be far more sophisticated and expensive than
those offered for cars and therefore won't become ubiquitous overnight. With
the aid of these instruments, as well as the pressure of the increasing price
of jet fuel, the FAA has undertaken a program that takes long-haul flights in
uncongested parts of the country off NAVAIDs and puts them on more fuel-
efficient paths, often straight lines, once the planes are out of their departure
patterns. Flights in opposite directions can take almost the same straight
line, as 1,000 feet of difference in altitude is accepted as a safety margin.
Back in the present, though: While preparing this guide, we
tracked hundreds of flights on the Web; the majority flew from NAVAID to
NAVAID. Since NAVAIDs are spots a lot of planes fly over, we include a lot
of NAVAIDs in the locations we illustrate in this guide: Garden City, Kansas;
Linden, California; Zuni and Albuquerque, New Mexico; Amarillo, Texas;
North Platte, Nebraska; Bowling Green, Kentucky; Jamestown, New York;
Carbondale and Williamsport, Pennsylvania; and Newport News, Virginia.
Three other reasons to fly crooked are to avoid rough weather, to
avoid military airspace when the military requires it, and for greater fuel
efficiency and speed when near the jet stream. We don't foresee those
diminishing. It can be well worth going hundreds of miles out of the way to
catch a ride on the jet stream eastbound or to avoid fighting it when
westbound. Transcontinental flights in the northern third of the country are
likeliest to make wide detours based on where the jet stream blows on flight
day.
So, you're wondering which path your flight is going to take
today? Sorry, we can't predict. A handheld GPS unit can often provide and
record precise positions if held very close to the window for several minutes
at a time. Some jetliners show you your progress on a digital map on
a "personal TV" screen. If you aren't so lucky, try asking your flight attendant,
during boarding, to pass along a request for the captain to announce an
outline of the flight path soon after takeoff . If enough of us ask, we may find
pilots making a habit of it before long.
If you have time, Internet access, and curiosity, you may enjoy
tracking your itinerary daily for a few days before departure. The tracking
Web sites we used are www. flytecomm.com, www.fboweb .com, and
www.flightview.com. Other Web sites predict the weather and the position of
the jet stream. If you see either severe storms or a contrary jet stream in
your path, expect a substantial deviation. Here's a Severe Weather
Avoidance Pattern (SWAP) taken by one Miami-to-Chicago flight in yellow,
compared to the typical flight path in green. the blue to red colors show
weather intensity.

Tips on Using This Guide On many heavily traveled itineraries, you could read
one of the corridor chapters from beginning to end. (That would be from end
to beginning if you are flying south to north or west to east.) Pay attention to
the cross-references to other chapters, at the lower right- and left-hand
corner; these refer you to a subject that is visible from both your flight corridor
and at least one other. Each article appears just once.
Most likely, some subjects in your corridor's chapter are far from
your flight path because the common paths between any two cities diverge
widely. You will have greater precision in turning to the right articles if you
follow your flight on the map and pick your articles in sequence by their
numbers on the map.
A few articles cover subjects so widespread that you could simply
go ahead and browse them at any time, because you're likely to see these
things by the time you've viewed any substantial stretch of the nation:
Center pivot irrigation (Great Plains to the Pacific), page 36
Forest fires (Rockies to the Pacific, and Southeast), page 288
Forests pests (Rockies and the Southeast), page 162
Interstate highway system (everywhere), page 76
Wind farms (scattered nationwide), page 65

On our maps and in our Index of Flights, major terminals are
represented with either standard three-letter airport codes or nonstandard two-
letter codes. For cities with one major airport, we use the standard three-
letter airport codes. For metro areas with multiple major airports, we treat all
the airports as one destination or origin, and we give it a two-letter
abbreviation so that we won't leave you scratching your head trying to think
what airport those three letters stand for. Here are our two-letter
abbreviations:

CH Chicago (MDW, ORD)
DC Washington, D.C., and Baltimore (BWI, DCA, IAD)
HO Houston (HOU, IAH)
LA Los Angeles (BUR, LAX, LGB, ONT, SNA)
MI Miami (FLL, MIA, PBI)
NY New York City (EWR, HPN, ISP, LGA, JFK, SWF)
SF San Francisco Bay Area (OAK, SFO, SJC)

Remember that several airport codes are non-intuitive: MCI for
Kansas City; MCO Orlando; MSY New Orleans; YUL Montreal; YVR
Vancouver; YYC Calgary; YYZ Toronto. We have indexed the 30 busiest
airports or metropolitan airport clusters in the United States, and the 3
busiest in Canada.
Before taking off , figure out which compass direction your window
faces for the main portion of the flight. If you

fly west, right-side seats look north, left-side seats look south
fly southwest, right side looks northwest, left looks southeast
fly south, right side looks west, left looks east
fly southeast, right side looks southwest, left looks northeast
fly east, right side looks south, left looks north
fly northeast, right side looks southeast, left looks northwest
fly north, right side looks east, left looks west
fly northwest, right side looks northeast, left looks southwest

Then do your best to read the landscape, especially i...

Customer Reviews

What's Out the Window is Better Than the Movie
America from the Air: A Guide to the Landscape Along Your Route

This book is an entirely new approach to looking at the US from above. More than just pictures, the book provides a route-by-route description of the sights you'll see along the route, together with annotated photographs to show you where things are and what you're seeing. Detailed texts tell you what to look for as you pass over different parts of your route. The back of the book has indexes that plot out common airline routes and cross-references to points along those routes. Many of the photographs are straight-down shots taken by NASA from space, but many others are plane-level views that depict the scenes the way you are likely to encounter them.

window seat, please!
I'm so surprised by the poor reviews. First, this book is definitely not meant for the coffee table. It is a travel guide of the very finest sort. It is designed to be used in-the-field (or, rather, above it) to orient air travelers to the views outside their window and it does so with aplomb. But it does so much more than that. The authors skilfully synthesize a history of earth's natural features with human history and demographic data. In addition to locating rivers and valleys and mountains and seas, it points out the contrast in urbanization and crop colors on the US/Mexico border, identifies Fermilab, windfarms, and the Atlantic City boardwalk. It also interprets the impact of forest fires and forest pests, and describes things like center pivot irrigation. It is well researched, well referenced, and well written and does an excellent job illustrating the remarkable relationship between humans and geography. I can't wait for my next flight.

Such unrealized potential
The idea is excellent - what, exactly, am I flying over right now? Selecting the most traveled air routes in the country is a great way to constrain the scope to a manageable effort. Unfortunately, this is a great idea that is very poorly executed.

For starters, the routes are very confusing to follow as they often have alternate paths. Just show me what LA to New York looks like, don't divert my attention by diverting me to Las Vegas or Phoenix or whatever.

Second, the pictures aren't very good. It is safe to say that very few of the pictures were taken from the window of a commercial jet. As a result, the view is not even close to what you would see from your window seat (unless you regularly fly in a satellite).

Again, a great idea. And kudos for making it a low-cost paperback. But the execution is poor.