America from the Air : A Guide to the Landscape along Your Route

by Mathews, Daniel

• ISBN13: 9780618706037
• ISBN10: 0618706038
• Edition: CD
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-12-14
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Paths Planes Fly	p. 1
Why Planes Don't Fly Straight	p. 1
Tips on Using this Guide	p. 2
Flight Corridors
New York-Las Vegas or Los Angeles	p. 4
New York-Cleveland-Detroit-Chicago-Denver-Las Vegas or Los Angeles	p. 6
New York-Philadelphia-Indianapolis-Kansas City-Phoenix-Las Vegas or Los Angeles	p. 68
New York-Philadelphia-Washington, D.C.-Florida	p. 104
Chicago-Atlanta-Florida	p. 136
Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Washington, D.C.-Atlanta	p. 152
Atlanta-Dallas-Phoenix-Los Angeles or San Diego	p. 166
San Francisco-Los Angeles	p. 194
Chicago-San Francisco	p. 208
New York-Washington, D.C.-Dallas	p. 230
Seattle-Portland-San Francisco or Los Angeles	p. 244
New York, Chicago, or Minneapolis-Seattle	p. 272
Florida-Texas	p. 294
Boston-Chicago	p. 310
Anchorage-Seattle	p. 318
Background
Clouds and Winds	p. 331
Light	p. 335
Landforms	p. 336
Plate Tectonics	p. 341
Index of Flights	p. 343
List of Articles	p. 361
Bibliography	p. 366
Illustration Credits	p. 370
Index	p. 371
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

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 YorkLos Angeles is an extreme example, with paths wandering farther apart than the north-to-south extent of Colorado. (The most northerly New YorkLos 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 YorkLos 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 YorkChicago, ChicagoLas 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 r