Why Fly: Seeking Awe, Healing, and Our True Selves in the Sky

by Caroline Paul

From the New York Times bestselling author Caroline Paul, a thrilling, gravity-defying book that takes us skyward to explore the art of aeronautics-and the depths of the human heart.

Flying has long represented the beautiful, high-stakes human drive to invent, to explore, to experience. Caroline Paul has known this since becoming a pilot at twenty years old. Now she's in her fifties, and her long-term marriage is dissolving beneath her. She begins to fly a gyrocopter. Isn't it easier to learn a landing than a human heart?

As Paul examines the descent of love through the ascent of flight, she turns her eye to the history, the physics, and the deep impact of flying on others. From the brave Night Witches who flew biplanes against the Nazis, to the ultralight pilots who believe they can save endangered birds by becoming one of the flock, to the many people afraid to step onto a passenger plane, Why Fly examines the ways flight, like love, confounds and yet transforms us. Often we soar. But we also crash land. Still, we want to fly. Why?

Genres: Nonfiction, Aviation

228 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 24, 2026

About the author

Caroline Paul is an American writer of fiction and nonfiction. Trained as a journalist and documentary filmmaker at Stanford University, she instead pursued a career as a firefighter, as one of the first women hired by the San Francisco Fire department. She worked most of her career on Rescue 2, where she and her crew were responsible for search and rescue in fires. Rescue 2 members were also trained and sent on scuba dive searches, rope and rapelling rescues, surf rescues, confined space rescues, all hazardous material calls, and the most severe train and car wrecks.

Source: Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Liralen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A meditation on flight, relationships, and adventure.

We were like those knitters who knit to pass the time in DMV queues and then unwind what they've done almost dispassionately, then knit again. (loc. 343*)

I read Paul's Fighting Fire a decade ago, and it's one of those books that I still think about on a regular basis. Now—Fighting Fire hits one of my more random reading interests, while I don't have a particular interest in flight. But Paul's writing is so tight and engaging, and it's so clear how much she loves flying (and in particular, flying gyroplanes! I didn't even know gyroplanes were a thing) and how much she's thought about it. This is a love letter to flying, and also a love letter to a deteriorating relationship (I promise this makes sense in the book).

Why Fly travels through historical record and memoir and recent aviation events, mishaps and triumphs. It culminates in a cross-country gyroplane trip, and my gosh, while this does not make me want to learn to fly (which is just as well; flying lessons are not in my budget), it does make me want to backtrack and read Paul's Tough Broad.

One for flight enthusiasts, yes, but also one for those who are just curious.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

[Gary Santos · Rating 5 out of 5]

A journalist friend recommended this book. She equated Christine Paul's style to Anne Lindbergh. That was enough to pique my interest. I'm not a flyer but I have understanding of the mechanics and history of aviation.

From the opening pages, Paul seamlessly melds the magic of flight with the quiet, complicated currents of life itself. Flying is never just flying here; it's a language for longing, risk, freedom, and self-reckoning.

Her prose are almost poetic. There’s a quiet wisdom threaded throughout, the sense that flight is less about escape and more about understanding where you stand when you finally come "home."

WHY FLY is thoughtful, lyrical, and deeply human.

[Richa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the idea of drawing parallels between love and flying doesn't make much sense to me, but the author's descriptions are quite interesting and enormously profound because she writes soulfully.
A research-oriented descriptions esp. one on the science of bird flight are amazing.