It is easy to forget the miraculousness of human progress. Because of the prosaic ways in which our lives have curled around comfort, we’ve grown accustomed to constant communication and rapid transportation; warm homes and clean water and croissants from the corner store have dulled that razor’s edge, the magnificence of modernity made gummy and malleable in its everyday iterations. Despite all of this bliss, the air travel industry—the act of stepping onto a plane and entrusting its pilot with your life and your luggage— is perhaps one of the only forms of meditation that has the ability to puncture the ignorance of even the most techno-indulgent.

On any given day, nearly three million people are ferried from points on earth to other points on earth by way of the volatile stratosphere. At any given second, hundreds of thousands of humans hurdle above us, encased in metal cabins, propelled by jet fuel and ground computers, hundreds of miles an hour through the air. Airplanes have existed for less than a century and a half—not even 0.001% of the period of time that humans have tread the planet—and to stroll through an airport, to board a crowded plane, to sit quietly in a shuddering seat during takeoff, to grow sleepy against a roaring engine—these things have the ability to incur an acute sense of awareness of our existence. What a terrifying and enthralling blip on the timeline to experience. What a gift it is, to live in a time where we can see the world from above.

Christiaan van Heijst, dutch 747 captain and award-winning photographer, is intimately familiar with the absurd wonders of air travel. Van Heijst has dedicated a life to capturing the foreign joys of the atmosphere, revealing the obscurities of the airborne world from the cockpit. See here, images he’s taken on his journeys to, from, and within the atmosphere.