The night is clear and cool. The crystal air reveals cities bright and clear for a hundred miles. Stretching to infinity, the ground lights’ lacey web ensnares our imagination, transporting us into another world. The moment fixes itself in the mind—you are compelled to share this ineffable moment with the love of your life and friends. But, are you equal to the task of describing the beauty and magic of this newfound treasure?
If your name isn’t Saint-Exupéry, Gann, Bach, or Lindbergh, you may have a hard time articulating the beauty and grandeur of flight. Their skill in describing the allure of flight is legendary and, in large measure, unsurpassed.
Perhaps we don’t need to be master wordsmiths when it comes to expressing the reasons why flight captivates us. Perhaps we should leave that to the masters and merely enjoy our craft, keeping it a coveted secret from the ground-bound world. Or, perhaps we can reinforce our aeronautical fascination by both experiencing flight and reading what the masters have to say about it.
It is a rare talent that draws the aeronautically inclined to the printed page, but when an exceptional author touches a pilot’s essence, we listen and treasure the experience.
Thousands of volumes have been written about aviation, but we do not automatically have thousands of true and special friends in their authors. That rare writer who comes alive on a page does it by giving of himself, by writing of meanings, and not just of fact or of things that have happened to him. The writers of flight who have done this are usually found together in a special section on private bookshelves. — Richard Bach
These writers paint impassioned pictures that resonate with our imagination; it is their vision put to paper that stirs us to reflect (never state), "Yes, yes!"
The Ocean of Air
The sky’s adornment of weather captivates us all, pilot and groundlings alike. Man’s fascination with weather is a mixture of love, respect, and—at times—loathing, but to the pilot it is a continuing source of wonderment:
Perhaps it is the sheer exuberance of the moving shapes I see from my work window up here. Or perhaps it is what naturally happens to thoughts that have too long been grazing in the pasture of the clouds. But every now and then I think I sense a maidenly wile in the way some passing nimbus form waves at us as we thunder by—our four engines coolly roaring.
A few of these buoyant wisps of clouds will only tentatively sway aside to let us pass, so awed are they by our slipstream, half turning to gaze wistfully after our virile hulk until we leave their view. And some cling to each other self-consciously—now giving way to timorous mirth, now raining a silent tear. — Guy Murchie
Lindbergh, too, was inspired by clouds to reflect:
By day, or on a cloudless night, a pilot may drink the wine of the gods, but it has an earthly taste; he’s a god of the earth, like one of the Grecian deities who lives on worldly mountains and descended for intercourse with men. But at night, over a stratus layer, all sense of the planet may disappear. You know that down below, beneath that heavenly blanket is the earth, factual and hard. But it’s an intellectual knowledge; it’s a knowledge tucked away in the mind; not a feeling that penetrates the body. And if at times you renounce experience and mind’s heavy logic, it seems that the world has rushed along on its orbit, leaving you alone flying above a forgotten cloud bank, somewhere in the solitude of interstellar space. — Charles Lindbergh
The Furies
Yet for every benign and beautiful sky we encounter there lurks a monstrous and threatening one.
Now, approaching this thunderstorm front....We are suddenly so puny we belong on glass, beneath a powerful microscope. The sensation is shocking, the escape of conceit from our being instantaneous. How can such infinitesimal creatures presume to trouble the heavens with our mewling hopes and complaints? For here, alongside mightiness, we are nothing.
Our altitude of more than two miles above the earth is less than half that of the most prominent thunderheads. The phalanx forms a solid precipice, which tumbles straight down from the edge of our wing tip, gray-black and green in the last light. Great blossoming fists of dirty white churn against each other all the way to its gloomy foundations. Inside the darker areas there are frequent explosions of light, marked simultaneously by savage crashes in our earphones. — Ernest K. Gann
Why Fly?
Despite these awesome displays, we are attracted to flight as moth to candle; most of us are mystified by this attraction. While we enjoy our craft, we offer lame replies that hide our true feelings when asked, "Why do you fly?" Because of this we are grateful when an articulate voice speaks for us.
You are brave. Not brave because you are going to be facing any physical dangers; you are not really going to. I mean brave in another, deeper sense. By being on this flight you have shown that you are willing to explore your own identity to discover what might lie within you. Your human clay has not hardened, and you are also willing to explore your own perceptions of the universe, knowing that you may be forced to set aside many comfortable and cherished assumptions. The idea that you must approach honestly and directly is that flying very dramatically makes the pilot solely responsible for his own life. — Harry Bauer
Pretty heavy stuff. Yet, there are less analytical views of why we fly:
These bright roofs, these steep towers, these jewel-lakes, these skeins of railroad line—all spoke to her and she answered. She was glad they were there. She belonged to them and they to her.… She had not lost it. She was touching it with her fingertips. This was flying: to go swiftly over the earth you loved, touching it lightly with your fingertips, holding the railroad lines in your hand to guide you, like a skein of wool in a spider-web game—like following Ariadne’s thread through the Minotaur’s maze. Where would it lead, where? — Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Gann elaborated further:
Are we lost, or are we found at last? On earth we strive for our various needs, because so goes the fundamental law of man. Aloft, at least for a little while, the needs disappear. Likewise, the striving.
In the thoughts of man aloft, good and evil become mixed and sometimes reversed. This is the open door to wisdom.
Aloft, the earth is ancient and man is young, regardless of his numbers, for there, aloft he may reaffirm his suspicions that he may not be so very much. This is the gateway to humility.
And yet, aloft there are moments when man can ask himself, "What am I, this creature so important to me? Who is it rules me from birth to tomb? Am I but a slave destined to crawl for labor to hearth and back again? Am I but one of the living dead, or my own god set free?" This is the invitation to full life....
"Where are we?"
"If you really must know, I’ll tell you."
"Never mind. Here aloft, we are not lost, but found." — Ernest K. Gann
"There I was…"
The challenges, and perhaps the dangers, of flight attract the aviator; certainly this is the stuff we read and learn from. We all want to hear of others’ flirtations with the hazards of flight, though vicariously.
It is the last splutter of the engine that stuns me. I can’t feel any fear; I can’t feel anything. I can only observe with a kind of stupid disinterest that my hands are violently active and know that, while they move, I am being hypnotized by the needle of my altimeter….
If it is night and you are sitting in an aeroplane with a stalled motor and there are two thousand feet between you and the sea, nothing can be more reasonable than the impulse to pull back the stick in the hope of adding to the two thousand, if only by a little. The thought, the knowledge, the law that tells you that your hope lies not in this, but in a contrary act—the act of directing your impotent craft toward the water—seems terrifying abandonment, not only for reason, but for sanity. Your mind and your heart reject it. It is your hands—your stranger’s hands. — Beryl Markham
Instructional flight through heavy weather is the subject of this passage from Saint-Exupéry:
It was as if dead matter were infected by his exasperation; at every plunge the engine set up such furious vibrations that all the fuselage seemed convulsed with rage. Fabien strained all his efforts to control it; crouching in the cockpit, he kept his eyes fixed on the artificial horizon only, for the masses of sky and land outside were not to be distinguished, lost both alike in a welter, as of worlds in the making. But the hands of the flying instruments oscillated more and more abruptly, grew almost impossible to follow. Already the pilot, misled by their vagaries, was losing altitude, fighting against odds, while deadly quicksands sucked him down into the darkness. He guessed their towering billows hard upon him for now it seemed that all these earthen monsters, the least of which could crush him into nothingness, were breaking loose from their foundations and careening about in a drunken frenzy. A dark tellurian carnival was thronging closer and closer around him. — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Time Alone
Enduring these experiences makes an indelible impression on us. Yet these adventures and frights are seldom recorded for posterity as narrative events, only as featureless hours meticulously recorded in our logbooks.
The times were in figures, the dull specifics which were supposed to record nothing more than the passage of intervals in our lives, and serve as official recognition that a certain amount of experience and consequent wisdom had dribbled into our aerial selves. The numerals, in summation, represented much more than this. For they said that our marrows had been both frozen and melted, our quotients of courage drained and replenished and our ability to act in fear proven. The numeral established as solid citizens of the skies—though not yet to be considered as true aristocrats. Altogether, the numerals stated that we knew how to remove ourselves and others out of our natural element, in all seasons and in all circumstances and conditions, and return the lot safely to earth.
And they also made an important announcement: Our luck was exceedingly good. — Ernest K. Gann
Man and Machine
The common thread that connects all of these eloquent scribes of flight is the human element; after waxing lyrical about aircraft, atmosphere, and challenges, the one essential element remains the pilot. Their message: Be equal to the task.
No den of dangers in this sky of ours,
Demanding dark ordeal of mind and soul;
But neither trollop for the weak or vain,
the boastful proud, the arrant fool.
There is no valid license for the churl.
No unearned rating saves the palsied hand.
No title, grade or rank bestows a boon.
The man’s the thing!
If he be right the sky cannot be wrong. — Gill Robb Wilson
To Touch the Spirit
Few attempt to deal with aspects of flying that touch the soul, to capture the spiritual aspect of flight. Yet those who do it well endure.
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew.
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touch the face of God. — John Gillespie Magee Jr.
John Sheehan is a retired Navy carrier pilot, airline transport pilot, and an experienced flight instructor with 7,700 flight hours. He is president of Professional Aviation Inc., an aviation consulting company, and a collector of aviation literature. He flies airplanes from airports in Wilmington, North Carolina, and also frequents used bookstores in that area. Additionally, Sheehan serves as IAOPA secretary general.
The Pilot Reading List
Unfortunately, many of the books listed here are out of print. Some, notably Gann’s and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s, have been republished. Most, however, may be found largely untouched in dusty stacks of your local library’s 629.13 and biography sections. Interested in owning a copy? Haunt your local used bookstore or search the Web for used and/or rare books—start with www.bookfinder.com.
- A Gift of Wings, Richard Bach, Delacorte Press, New York, 1974
- Song of the Sky, Guy Murchie, The Riverdale Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1954
- The Spirit of St. Louis, Charles A. Lindbergh, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1961
- Fate is the Hunter, Ernest K. Gann, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1961
- The Flying Mystique: Exploring Reality and Self in the Sky, Harry Bauer, Delacorte Press, New York, 1980
- The Steep Ascent, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1944
- Ernest K. Gann’s Flying Circus, Ernest K. Gann, Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, 1974
- West With the Night, Beryl Markham, North Point Press, 1983
- Airman’s Odyssey (Night Flight), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Reynal & Hitchcock, New York, 1939
- The Airman’s World, Gill Robb Wilson, Random House, New York, 1957
- High Flight—A Story of World War II, Linda Granfield, Tundra Books, Toronto, Canada, 1999 (discusses the poem by John Gillespie Magee Jr.)
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