“There’s no sensation to compare with this/ Suspended animation, a state of bliss,” sang David Gilmour on Pink Floyd’s song Learning to Fly, and Mark Vanhoenacker’s much-praised half-meditation, half-travelogue gives a fine account of why air travel can still give its participants a blissful experience. Vanhoenacker’s unconventional background – he abandoned careers in both academia and management consultancy to fly and today works for British Airways – makes him an authoritative guide to the skies; the book’s subtitle – A Journey With a Pilot – has several associations.

Although attacks on aircraft have intensified fear of flying, Vanhoenacker’s calm and scrupulously composed prose style is soothing; little harm, you feel, could befall you with him as your navigator. Piloting  is his muse, vocation and hobby all in one. He states early that “flight, like any great love, is both a liberation and a return” and he is alert to the possibility of what that can be, whether it’s a prosaic journey from one destination to another, an escape from the mundane into the unknown or simply a chance to re-examine the world passengers are suspended above for a few hours. Statistics that surprise and jolt are scattered throughout the book; at one point, Vanhoenacker notes that “by one estimate, the portion of the Earth’s surface on which an unclothed human could survive for 24 hours is about 15%”.

Divided into chapter headings that could themselves be Pink Floyd song titles – “Water”, “Machine”, “Encounters” and so on – the narrative is, appropriately, a soaring tribute to both man and machine. Just as it seems that Vanhoenacker is more interested in piloting than people, he offers details that bring the strange, (ironically) airless existence of the crew to life, such as the way that bonds as close as family ties are formed for a few hours at a time between people who might never meet again. As he says of the accidents and natural disasters that leave travellers and staff alike stranded together, “nothing binds as tightly as the shared inability to return home”.

Thanks to the rise of budget airlines, air travel is no longer an experience limited to the few, which has led to its seeming ordinary, even banal. Yet Vanhoenacker manages to make flying seem fresh and exciting again. He writes how “the ordinary things we thought we knew… become more beautiful”. It is hard not to agree.

Skyfaring is published by Vintage (£8.99). Click here to buy it for £7.19