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

By Daniel Mathews and James S. Jackson

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. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618706038
• ISBN13: 9780618706037
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 386 Pages
• Weight: 2.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 9.2" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

Air Tour

Fabulous book with CD. A must have for the constant traveler or sighseeing buff.

Great for Pilots and Dads alike!

Got this for my father-in-law and grandfather for Christmas - both of whom are former pilots. They especially enjoyed reading about things they had flown over but never known about. The entire family enjoyed the great photography, descriptions, and the CD-ROM in the back cover. We are all now taking turns looking at the CD-ROM - it's a great little perk!

Interesting gift, needs more pictures

I bought this book as a gift after a review in Wired. It has major routes, and large area pictures of main land features and discussion of the routes. I wish it had more pictures, more analysis, and and more blowups of the land features. Perhaps looking at the images by computer on the CD (which comes with the book, and which is a copy of the book) would allow zooming in on features in more detail (which I haven't tried)...

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...

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...