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Canada are absent, too, as is the entire continent of Australia. A similar but inverted sort of blankness covers the peaks of the Himalayas. In 1933, only three decades after the first flight at Kitty Hawk, the peak of Everest was overflown by an airplane, though one of the onboard photographers passed out from a lack of oxygen. Today there are few routes over much of the Himalayas—not because airliners cannot easily overfly even Everest, but because the terrain beneath limits their ability to descend in the event of technical problems. For this reason many pilots consider the planet’s highest mountains least often of all.

    The air of the world is divided in other ways. We cannot fly just anywhere. Large regions of airspace are restricted, often for military use, while many smaller chunks are blocked off because they lie over noise-sensitive areas—the center of a city or the palace of a sultan. These restricted airspace blocks are usually marked on our charts by combinations of letters and numbers, not names. But near Mumbai is one known as the Tower of Silence. In the city is a structure on which members of the Parsi community can ritually leave the bodies of the deceased to be consumed by vultures, a process that is elsewhere called a sky burial. The area and its name are marked in red on our charts. Some areas where no jets will fly have a ceiling and stop at a certain height, but the Tower of Silence goes all the way up.
    There are, of course, great socioeconomic divisions in the world that airliners cross almost as if they do not exist. Even poor countries generally have internationally standardized air-traffic rules and control services. We can envisage in the sky a kind of continuous space, an insulated sphere above and around the earth, in which these standards prevail, regardless of the conditions on the ground below. A plane flies through this well-regulated realm, over cities and countries where we would not wish to land if we had an ill passenger onboard, places that in terms of certain medical services might as well be the ocean; and then we descend from this upper world through similarly regulated corridors down to our destination itself, where a long list of standards—from the suitability of the available water to various safety-related aviation functions—have been assessed. An airliner bound for certain cities will leave London with water onboard for both the outbound and return journeys—sometimes carrying even round-trip fuel and food as well.

    In Cape Town, if the wind is from the north, you land from the south, flying, in the last minutes of the flight, near Khayelitsha, a Xhosa name that is almost as beautiful in English—New Home—and Mitchell’s Plain, townships that each house hundreds of thousands of people. When I have flown there as a passenger, and had the time to look, I have been struck visually by the power of birth and circumstance: the picture of inequity made by the shining wings from somewhere far away crossing over these settlements, and the freedom international travelers have to descend over the morning of half a million people, some of whom will have already flown, or will one day fly, but many of whom probably never will.
    It occurs to me, when I am flying over Hokkaido or rural Austria or Oklahoma City, to ask who might look up and see the contrails of the plane light up at dawn. I feel this equally when I am on the ground looking up at a plane, on the other side of this greeting, as if I’m still a kid marveling at what it must be like to be way up there or remembering my first flight. But there are many places where such reciprocity cannot yet be reflected, the places the plane moves freely over, where place is as heavy as lead.
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    The most curious aspect of the pilot’s life may not be that we work in the air. It is that our world on the ground—the realm of places we know well, and that we connect to other places, the world that for a child begins with the