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From the archives

The Prognosis

Looking the consequences in the eye

The Passport

New-found meaning behind that slim and elegant booklet

The Canadian Conversation

A Polish journalist’s perspective on residential schools

Plane and Simple

A new pilot project

Kelvin Browne

This Is Your Captain Speaking: Stories from the Flight Deck

Doug Morris

ECW Press

272 pages, softcover and ebook

Captain Doug Morris flies the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, “for an airline with a maple leaf emblazoned on its fuselage.” His employer’s name is almost the only detail missing from this compilation of facts and anecdotes about air travel.

This Is Your Captain Speaking aspires to be comprehensive and amusing, so it’s more like Aviation for Dummies than like Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain’s classic tell‑all. But Morris’s approach is probably best, because you want to believe pilots are calm, cool, and collected. Otherwise, you might worry your jet has a chef-on-heroin figure in command (which isn’t to say mental health and stress-induced problems don’t exist on the flight deck, of course). Nor does Morris offer stories of near catastrophe, except when they happen in the flight simulator.

His book...

Kelvin Browne wrote Bold Visions: The Architecture of the Royal Ontario Museum.

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