You've watched the crappy movie, read Hemispheres, eaten the soggy $10 panini you bought in the terminal, and flipped through SkyMall three times. Yet still — hours to go before touchdown at SFO. You gaze out the window and wonder: What the hell are those weird green and yellow circles (A) scattered across the Midwest? Had you thought ahead, you'd have brought a copy of America From the Air, a new self-styled "field guide to air travel," annotating the 30,000-foot view along the country's most frequented flight paths. Actually, an experienced passenger would have loaded the included CD-ROM onto a laptop and left the heavy book at home. In its 352 pages of aerial photos and snappy text, America From the Air reveals dozens of geological, agricultural, and man-made curios you'd never know to look for, let alone identify. Among the transcontinental treats: undulatus clouds over Tennessee (B), Arizona's Barringer Meteor Crater (C), the San Andreas Fault (D), the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado, and Fermilab's 1.3-mile-wide Tevatron particle accelerator just west of O'Hare. Of course, any decent pilot will announce when you're flying over Mount Saint Helens (E), but only this guide will tell you that its 1980 eruption packed the force of 500 Hiroshima bombs. Indexed by flight (SLC-BOS, SEA-PHL, and so on) and divided into chapters based on the 14 major US air corridors, Air took shape when one of the writers, James Jackson, was a geologist for ARCO and flew routinely over the Appalachian ridge. At first, getting the geology right was a lot easier than collecting flight path info (short of flying every route). Jackson and coauthor Daniel Mathews came up against post 9/11 suspicion from pilots and air-traffic controllers but were able to nail down all the paths with the help of flight-tracking Web sites and, eventually, the FAA. By the way, those circles? They're ordinary crops — corn, soy, sorghum, wheat — planted in round patterns thanks to a 1950 technological innovation called center pivot irrigation.
| Michigan Proving Ground, Romeo, Michigan Fermilab and the Tevatron, Batavia, Illinois Center Pivot Irrigation near Holstein, NE Meteor Crater, Arizona Lake Havasu City, Arizona Salton Sea and Imperial Valley, California San Andreas Fault on the Carrizo Plain, California| Mt. Rainier, Washington Mt. St. Helens, Washington Tulare Lake, California The Channeled Scablands, Washington Mississippi Birdfoot Delta and Chandeleur Islands, Louisiana Malaspina Glacier and Mt. St. Elias, Alaska
EXTENTMichigan Proving Ground, Romeo, Michigan 
Fermilab and the Tevatron, Batavia, Illinois 
Center Pivot Irrigation near Holstein, NE 
Meteor Crater, Arizona 
Lake Havasu City, Arizona 
Salton Sea and Imperial Valley, California 
San Andreas Fault on the Carrizo Plain, California 
Mt. Rainier, Washington 
Mt. St. Helens, Washington 
Tulare Lake, California 
Mississippi Birdfoot Delta and Chandeleur Islands, Louisiana 
Mississippi Birdfoot Delta and Chandeleur Islands, Louisiana 
Malaspina Glacier and Mt. St. Elias, Alaska 
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