Books with title Airborne

2005 EOS mass market paperback, kenneth oppel (The Boundless). Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on the Aurora, a huge airship that sails hundreds of feet above the ocean, ferrying wealthy passengers from city to city. It is the life Matt's always wanted; convinced he's lighter than air, he imagines himself as buoyant as the hydrium gas that powers his ship. One night he meets a dying balloonist who speaks of beautiful creatures drifting through the skies. It is only after Matt meets the balloonist's granddaughter that he realizes that the man's ravings may, in fact, have been true, and that the creatures are completely real and utterly mysterious.

Enter a past in which airplanes have never been invented, giant airships rule the skies and the glittering skyscrapers of Lionsgate City, Canada’s greatest metropolis, rise near the Pacificus Ocean. When Matt Cruse, cabin boy on the luxury airship Aurora, fearlessly performs a dramatic rescue to save an old man from his damaged hot air balloon, he doesn’t know what events he’s setting in motion. Will he and the balloonist’s fiery granddaughter, Kate de Vries, be able to solve the mystery of impossible flying creatures seen among the clouds? And will they figure it out before pirates and shipwreck end their voyage forever? Winner of the Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature and many other national and international honours, Kenneth Oppel’s tale of aerial adventure has fired the imaginations of readers around the world. An instant classic!

Sailing toward dawn, and I was perched atop the crow's nest, being the ship's eyes. We were two nights out of Sydney, and there'd been no weather to speak of so far. I was keeping watch on a dark stack of nimbus clouds off to the northwest, but we were leaving it far behind, and it looked to be smooth going all the way back to Lionsgate City. Like riding a cloud. . . .Matt Cruse is a cabin boy on the Aurora, a huge airship that sails hundreds of feet above the ocean, ferrying wealthy passengers from city to city. It is the life Matt's always wanted; convinced he's lighter than air, he imagines himself as buoyant as the hydrium gas that powers his ship. One night he meets a dying balloonist who speaks of beautiful creatures drifting through the skies. It is only after Matt meets the balloonist's granddaughter that he realizes that the man's ravings may, in fact, have been true, and that the creatures are completely real and utterly mysterious. In a swashbuckling adventure reminiscent of Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Oppel, author of the best-selling Silverwing trilogy, creates an imagined world in which the air is populated by transcontinental voyagers, pirates, and beings never before dreamed of by the humans who sail the skies.