Flying Books II

            Mark Vanhoenacker’s book made me think back to others by people who are able to describe the peculiar joys of flying, or some part of the experience, with grace and accuracy. My favorites include the aviation classics as well as some recent books. An almost inevitable place to start is Charles Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis (1953), a description of Lindbergh’s nonstop flight from New York to Paris in 1927.  Lindbergh was competing for the $25,000 Orteig Prize for the first heavier-than-air craft to fly between New York and Paris nonstop.  He flew a custom-built Ryan monoplane with a Wright Whirlwind engine, a cockpit behind an enormous gas tank, heavy-duty landing gear, and no forward visibility.  The key to Lindbergh’s success, aside from some luck, probably lay in his attention to detail during the design, the building, and the testing of the plane as well as his realistic assessment of wind and weather as he flew.

            Because Lindbergh’s hourly log of the flight was stolen by someone in the huge crowd that rushed his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, at Paris’s Le Bourget airfield, he had to reconstruct it using memory, his maps, the engine’s performance curves, and whatever other information he could recover, and the log entries form chapter heads of the long middle section of the book, about the flight itself.  Lindbergh narrates in a clear style in the present tense, which keeps us in the moment as he encounters squalls, climbs to avoid weather, and fights sleepiness. The only trouble with Lindy’s book is that it is so matter-of-fact one can forget what a tremendous accomplishment his dead-reckoning crossing of the Atlantic was.

            In the 1920s and 30s, Antoine de Saint Exupéry flew mail and passengers for Latécoère, which became Aéropostale, flying from Toulouse into Spain and across to French West Africa and later flying in South America.  He describes these flying experiences in Wind, Sand, and Stars, which was published in 1939 and translated the same year.

            The most remarkable part of the book describes a 1935 Paris-to-Saigon flight St. Exupéry attempts with his mechanic, Prévot, in a Caudron Simoun, one of the fastest planes of the time.  They lose landmarks in clouds and encounter adverse winds in Libya.  They crash at full speed onto a gentle slope covered with “round black pebbles which had rolled over and over like ball-bearings beneath us.”  Their water tank is pierced and they survive for days on a couple of oranges and a tiny amount of water, hiking away from the plane by day and building signal fires near it by night.  Eventually they are rescued by a Bedouin caravan, and next day they are in Cairo.  About flying, as about other human activities, St. Exupéry concludes that “What all of us want is to be set free.” 

In North to the Orient, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who married Charles in 1929, describes a flight the couple took through Canada, Alaska, Russia, and Japan to China in 1931, flying a Lockheed Sirius low-wing monoplane with a 700 horsepower radial Cyclone engine, pontoons, and enough fuel capacity to extend its range to 2,000 miles.  Anne learned to send and receive Morse Code and operated the radio on board.

            After several days in the Northwest Territories, the Lindberghs push on to Point Barrow, at the northern tip of Alaska, then to Nome and into the Soviet Union, where Lindbergh enjoys her brief encounter with Russians.  Flying on to Japan, they are forced by fog to land in the Chishima archipelago, where singing sailors from a Japanese fishing boat befriend them.  As they are about to leave Osaka, they find a stowaway in the baggage compartment, an unhappy teenager who thought they were on their way back to America.  But they were headed to China, where they find the Yangtze in flood and assist in aid and rescue efforts.    Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s is the book that Rinker Buck (see below) thought was “the best flying memoir of all.” 

Beryl Markham’s West with the Night (1942) impressed Hemingway with its style.  Markham was flying an Avian biplane as a free-lance pilot in 1935 in Nairobi; she believed herself to be “the only woman professional pilot in Africa at that time.”  Markham grew up in Kenya, where her father raised thoroughbreds, and she trained horses for a living before she learned to fly.  In 1936 Markham became the first woman to fly from east to west across the Atlantic, and ended by crash-landing her Vega Gull in Nova Scotia.

In Last Flight, Amelia Earhart describes her various trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific flights, as well as each leg of her around-the-world flight except the last one.  On July 2, 1937, she and Fred Noonan, her navigator, took off from Lae, New Guinea, in their two-engine Lockheed Electra. They never reached their destination of Howland Island in the Pacific.  This book, which also contains Earhart’s reminiscences about growing up and learning to fly, was put together by her husband, George Palmer Putnam, from narratives which she worked up from notes and sent Putnam at each stop in her flights. 

In Fate Is the Hunter, Ernest K. Gann writes about his decades of flying with various airlines and with the Air Transport Command during World War II.  Throughout the book he lists the names of pilots killed in various mid-air collisions, flights into mountains during instrument conditions, mishaps during storms, equipment failure, or the mistakes of ground crews.  His last chapter is a story designed to make his point about fate choosing favorites: Gann survived a flight even though an elevator securing rod had been left off his airplane, while the same day two fellow pilots died because of the same problem in theirs.  But the book is more than a cautionary tale about the risks of flying: it’s a memoir of a life in aviation and of the life of aviation itself, from DC-2s and DC-3s to modern jumbo jets. 

Beyond these classics, there are many good flying books on my shelves. More recent books have the advantage of talking about a kind of flying that is likely to be nearer the reader’s experience than the flights of the Lindberghs, Markham, and St. Exupéry.  

            In 1966, Rinker Buck was only fifteen and his brother Kernahan just seventeen when they set out to fly a Piper Cub across the country from New Jersey to California.  More than thirty years later Rinker Buck wrote the story of that trip in Flight of Passage: A Memoir (1997).

            The fourth day of the six-day flight is the most exciting as the boys take on the Rockies at Guadalupe Pass, a narrow ravine between two 8700-foot peaks, coaxing the Cub to its service ceiling of 10,000 feet and higher, through midsummer heat and low-density air.  At each stop from El Paso to their California destination, reporters and cameramen make much of them, sometimes comparing them to Jack and Bobby Kennedy, whom they resemble slightly.  Because Buck is writing this memoir in the 1990s, the whole book has the feel of an elegy for simpler flying times and less crowded skies. 

            You would think it would be easier to teach a poet to fly than to teach a pilot to write poetry, but poet Diane Ackerman had a lot of trouble in the early stages of her flight instruction, as she recounts in On Extended Wings (1985), and it took her thirty-five hours to solo.  She is very good at remembering what instruction was like, how learning comes in plateaus of achievement, and how instructors talk (“dance the rudders . . . fly the plane to the ground”).  Just as Ackerman is getting ready to take the written, her instructor is killed in a plane crash.  She stays on the ground for a month.   Finally the dead instructor’s friend gets her flying again, and she goes on to get her license.  Ackerman’s book will take every pilot back to the experience of learning to fly.

            Henry Kisor was the book-review editor for the Chicago Sun-Times until his retirement.  When he was fifty-three, he decided to learn to fly.  In Flight of the Gin Fizz: Midlife at 4,500 Feet (1997), Kisor describes his retracing of the New York-to-California flight of Calbraith Perry Rogers in 1911, the first transcontinental flight.  He flies into small airports and an occasional larger one, and he reports on the sometimes languishing, often flourishing state of general aviation in America.  Because Kisor is completely deaf, he usually flew in and out of non-towered aiports, but prearranged light-gun landings and take-offs let him use larger ones as well.   He narrates his adventures with a zestful, if-I-can-do-it-so-can-you style.

            Another journalist, Mariana Gosnell, was working at Newsweek as the medicine and science reporter in 1977 when she took three months leave to travel around and take the notes that eventually became Zero Three Bravo: Solo Across America in a Small Plane (1993), named for her Luscombe Silvaire 8F, N803B.  She flies a huge circle around the United States, down the East Coast into the deep south, to the Gulf Coast, to Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, then north and across the northern tier of states and down through Nebraska, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and back to Spring Valley Airport near New York City where she keeps her Luscombe, which a refueler along her way calls “the perfect vagabond airplane.”  She stops at small airports, meeting many characters, describing the details of cross-country flying in a small plane, and revealing the mixed feelings of apprehension and joy that flying inspires in her. Few other writers ever bring up the apprehension, but a certain element of fear is a healthy ingredient in a pilot’s makeup, keeping the edge on the preparation that is called, accurately, “risk management.”

Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight (1998), is a collection of essays by William Langewiesche, the son of Wolfgang Langewiesche, who wrote one of the classic books about the mechanics of flying, Stick and Rudder (1944).  William is a staff writer for Atlantic Monthly.  Early in the book, Langewiesche declares his belief “that flight’s greatest gift is to let us look around,” and he illustrates by describing the view from various kinds of airplanes—paragliders powered and unpowered, jets, and small airplanes flown just high enough.  “The best views are views of familiar things,” he writes.  Langewiesche points out the irony that flying does not become possible until the Wright brothers figure out how to turn an airplane, but an airplane’s turn is strange and can confuse instincts and perceptions, even in experienced pilots.  He describes flying in bad weather, straightens out some misconceptions about air traffic control (“controllers don’t guide airplanes”), and considers the possibility that in very complex systems such as commercial air travel, accidents may be inevitable.

William Kershner died in early 2007.  Logging Flight Time (2001) is a collection of his short pieces that talk about his fifty years of primary flight instruction, military flying, flight testing, and aerobatics instruction.  Most of these chapters were published in the magazine of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, AOPA Pilot.  When I was taking lessons for my private certificate, a Tucson flight instructor asked me what book I was using for preparation, and when I said Kershner’s The Student Pilot’s Flight Manual she said, “Oh, he’s the technical one.  He’ll give you graphs and tables for everything.”  I was grateful for the graphs and tables, being a person who thinks more information is always better.  But Kershner entertains as well as informs.  One previously unpublished chapter here describes a night launch and landing on a carrier.  In the military, Kershner flew Corsairs, Bearcats, Hellcats, Panthers, Cougars, and Banshees.  Once out of the service, he started a flying school and an aerobatic school in his native Tennessee.  After you’ve read Ernest Gann and William Langewiesche on the risks of aviation, William Kershner will remind you that flying is fun, and sometimes funny as well.

Some books, like Osa Johnson’s I Married Adventure(1940), are fascinating in their own right, but have only a small portion devoted to flying (Osa and Martin Johnson flew their Wasp-powered amphibious Sikorsky planes in their travels all over Africa).  A whole shelf of fascinating books concerns wartime aviation from 1915 to the present.  Here you’ll find Richard Hillary’s account of being shot down over the channel in the Battle of Britain, Falling though Space (1942), Peter Townsend’s definitive book on the whole of the Battle of Britain, Duel of Eagles (1970), books about dogfights between MiGs and Sabre Jets in the Korean war, and many more.