All pilots live the same sky the world around, but airline pilots have more trappings and live more rigidly than do any other kind; than even military pilots. They must shine their shoes, wear neckties, be kind to all passengers, follow each comany rule and Federal Air Regulation, never lose their temper.
In return for this, they receive (a) more money for less work than any tradesman anywhere, and, most important, (b) the privilege of flying excellent airplanes, without having to apologize to anybody.
Today the major airlines require college training of their pilot applicants, and so lose the best stick-and-rudder airmen to the nonscheduled airlines (who need better pilots anyway, to cope with a wider range of problems), to agricultural and corporate flying concerns. Why the college requirement, is unclear, since all that a zoology-trained pilot has to fall back upon is Ichthyology 201, while the life-trained pilot, whose ranks are legion but diminishing, flies his airplane home on knowing born of interest and love instead of company requirement.
The path between the kingdoms at Kennedy is at best one-way … no one walks the pilot’s kingdom who is not a pilot. And the path is very nearly no-way. The best of airmen is notoriously ill-at-ease on the ground, unless he is talking about flying, which he usually is and so makes do.
You can see it in the pilots coming off duty at Kennedy, all conservative uniforms and round-billed caps, whatever nation their airline. You’ll see them awkward, self-conscious, most of them, looking straight ahead, in a hurry to get out of the passengers’ kingdom and into somewhere more comfortable.
Each is painfully aware of his alien status in the concourses and decorated halls. To each there is nothing so indecipherable as the man who could choose to be passenger instead of pilot, the one who would choose any life but flight, who can stay away from the airplanes, not think about them even, and yet be happy. Passengers are a different race of humans, and pilots stay as far from them as courteously possible. Ask a pilot someday how many real friends he has who are not pilots themselves, and he will be hard-pressed to think of a single one.
The pilot is blissfully unaffected by anything that happens at the airport which does not directly bear on his flying—as far as he is concerned, the passengers’ kingdom doesn’t really exist, though occasionally he will look at the people with a benign sort of paternal affection. His world is very pure, without cynics or amateurs, and it is very simple. Its realities center on his airplane and fan out to include wind speed and direction, temperature, visibility, runway conditions, navigation aids, air traffic clearance, destination- and alternate-airport weather. That about locks it up. There are other elements: seniority, the six months’ physical examination, flight checks in the aircraft, but those are ancillary to his kingdom, not the core of it. If ground traffic is bumper-locked in ten thousand automobiles, if there is a construction workers’ strike, if organized crime is sordid and everywhere, stealing millions annually from the airport, he is completely untouched. The pilot’s only reality is his airplane and the forces that affect it in flight. That is why airline travel is the safest transportation in the history of man.
Perspective
I used to wonder, a few years ago, about railroad tracks. I’d stand between them, watch them go out into the world, and the two rails narrowed, they came together, they touched each other just five miles west, on the horizon. Monster locomotives would go hiss-thundering west through town, and since a locomotive is the kind of giant that needs its rails set just so, I knew there had to be a great pile of steaming wreckage just beyond the place where the tracks came together. I knew that the engineers had to be fiercely brave men, blurring past the Main Street crossing with a grin and a wave, facing certain death on the horizon.
Eventually, I found that the railroad tracks didn’t really meet beyond our town, but I didn’t get over my awe around railroad men till the day I met my first airplane. Since then, I’ve followed track all over the country and haven’t yet seen a set of rails come together. Ever. Anywhere.
I used to wonder, a few years ago, about fog and rain: why was it, some days, that the whole earth was gray and wet, the whole world a miserable, flat, sad place to live? I wondered how bleakness happened to the whole planet at once, and how it was that the sun, so bright yesterday, had turned to ash. Books tried to explain, but it wasn’t till I began to know an airplane that I found that clouds don’t cover the whole world at all—that even from where I stood in the worst of the rain, soaking wet on the runway, all I had to do to find the sun again was to fly above the clouds.
It wasn’t easy to do that. There were certain definite rules to follow, if I really wished to gain the freedom of clear air. If I chose to ignore those rules, if I chose to thrash around wildly, to insist that I could tell up from down all on my own, following the impulse of the body instead of the logic of understanding, I would invariably fall down. In order to find that sun, even today, I have to ignore what seems right to my eyes and hands, and rely totally on the instruments given me, no matter how strangely they seem to speak, how senseless they appear to be. Trusting those instruments is the only possible way anyone can ever break out into the sunlight. The thicker and darker the cloud, I found, the longer and more carefully I had to trust the pointers and my skill in knowing what they say. I proved it over and again: if only I kept climbing, I could reach the top of any storm, and lift into the sun at last.
I learned, when I began flying, that boundaries between countries, with all their little roads and gates and checkpoints and Prohibited signs, are quite difficult to see from the air. In fact, from altitude I couldn’t even tell when I had flown across the border of one country into another, or what language was in fashion on the ground.
An airplane will bank to the right with right aileron, I found, no matter if it’s American or Soviet, British or Chinese or French or Czech or German, no matter who’s flying it, no matter what insignia is painted on the wing.
I’ve seen this and more, flying, and it all falls under one label. Perspective. It is perspective, it is getting above the railroad track, that shows we needn’t fear for the safety of locomotives. It is perspective that shows us beyond the illusion of a sun’s death, that suggests if we lift ourselves high enough, we’ll realize that the sun has never left us at all. It is perspective that shows the barriers between men to be imaginary things, made real only by our own believing that barriers exist, by our own bowing and cringing and constant fear of their power to limit us.
It is perspective that stamps itself upon every person up for his first flight in an airplane: “Hey, the traffic down there … the cars look like toys!”
As he learns to fly, the pilot discovers that the cars down there are toys, after all. That the higher one climbs, the farther he sees; the less important are the affairs and crises of those who cling to the ground.
From time to time, then, as we walk our way on this little round planet, it’s good to know that a lot of that way can be flown. We might even find, at the end of our journey, that the perspective we’ve found in flight means something more to us than all the dust-mote miles we’ve ever gone.
The pleasure of their company
“You’ll want to press that little brass plunger there … flood the carburetor before she’ll start.”
It was a month into summer and a minute into sunrise. We stood at the edge of a sixteen-acre meadow, a mile north of Felixstowe on the Ipswich road. David Garnett’s Gipsy Moth was fresh-dragged from her shed, wings unfolded and locked in place, tailskid hidden in grass. Across the field the first birds were coming awake, larks or something. There was no wind.
I pushed the plunger and the frail metal squeak of it was the only man-made sound of morning, until the petrol fell from the engine and hit the dark grass.
“You can take the rear cockpit, if you wish. I’m up for the ride,” he said. “Careful of the compass, getting in. I’ve smashed the thing twice now, myself. If I wasn’t right at home with it set down there on the floor, I’d thro
w it out and get a better. Switches off.”
He stood by the propeller in his tweedy-cloth flying clothes, in no particular hurry, enjoying the morning.
“You do have switches in this machine, David?”
I felt like a dumb Colonial. Supposed to be an airplane pilot and I can’t even find the magneto switch.
“Oh, yes. Sorry I didn’t say. Outside the cockpit, next the windscreen. Up is on.”
“Ah, so.” I checked that they were down. “They say off.”
He pulled the propeller through a couple of times, calm and easy, with the detachment of one who has done this a thousand times over and still enjoys it all. He had learned to fly rather late on in life, and it had taken him twenty-eight hours of dual instruction before he finally soloed the Moth. He neither brags nor apologizes over it. One of the best things about David Garnett is that he is honest with himself and the world, and therefore is a happy man.
“Switches on,” he called.
I clicked them up. “OK. You’re hot.”
“Pardon?”
“Switches on.”
He pulled the propeller quickly down with one hand and a practiced turn of wrist, and the engine caught at once. After a brief little roar it settled to perk quietly at 400 rpm, with the sound of a small inboard Chris-Craft at idle on a blue-morning lake.
Garnett climbed rather awkwardly into the front cockpit, fastened his leather helmet down over his head, and adjusted his Meyrowitz goggles—of which he is quite proud, for they are first-rate goggles. When he isn’t flying his helmet and goggles hang on a hook just over his fireplace at Hilton.
I let the Gipsy engine warm for a few minutes, than touched the throttle forward and we scraped and teetered to face the longest way across the field. The Moth had no brakes, so I checked the magnetos quickly on takeoff, and, full power, the machine leaped up into the air.
It was a little like that moment in a spectacular motion picture when for visual effect they run the film in black and white, and then flick it over into color. As we came off the grass, the sun burst and sprayed yellow light all over England, which strangely made the trees and meadows go full, deep British green, and the lanes gold and warm.
I played about with the airplane a bit, a lazy eight and a steep turn, but most of all just little turns and a climb up to one thousand feet and a rush back down to sea level below the cliffs by the ocean, dodging gulls.
The haze came up an hour later, and clouds capped it down to earth, so we pulled up into the gray, keeping the airspeed between sixty and seventy and the sun overhead, till we broke out on top at three thousand feet, “… above a plain of vapour,” as David would say. The sun shone brilliantly, black shadows of struts and wires striped the wings. We were alone with the cloud and with our thoughts that morning. Only an occasional triangle of green slid below to remind us that the earth still existed, somewhere.
At last I shut down the engine and duplicated a flight that he had told me about: “… yes, there were the hangars and the aerodrome … (and there they were, and two miles beyond, our meadow) … I did a big sideslip, but even so I overshot and went round again … (so did I—we were still two hundred feet up when we came across the fence) … This time my approach was perfect and my landing curiously soft and dreamlike. I was on the earth, but the earth was unreal, a limbo of haze and softened sunlight. Reality was far above me …”
I’ve done a lot of flying with this soft-spoken fellow, and in this day of few real friends, when a man is fortunate to go past three counting them, David Garnett is a real friend. We like the same things: the sky, the wind, the sun; and when you fly with somebody who puts his value on the same things that you do, you can say that he is a friend. Anyone else in that Moth, bored by the sky, would no more have been a friend than that businessman twelve rows down the aisle of a 707, though we share our flying a thousand times.
In a way, I know Garnett even better than his own wife knows him, for she can never quite understand why he wants to throw hours away in that noisy, windswept contraption that sprays oil all over one’s face. I do understand why.
But probably the most curious thing about knowing David Garnett is that though we’ve done a lot of flying together and though I know him very well, I have no idea what the man looks like, or even if he is still alive. For David Garnett is not only an airplane pilot, he is a writer, and to one way of thinking, the talks we’ve had and the places we’ve flown have all been between the battered covers of his book, A Rabbit in the Air, published in London in 1932.
The way to know any writer, of course, is not to meet him in person but to read what he writes. Only in print is he most clear, most true, most honest. No matter what he might say in polite society, catering to convention, it is in his writing that we find the real man.
David Garnett, for instance, writes that after flying those twenty-eight hours of dual instruction, after flying those thirty-six lessons, all he did after his first flight alone in the Moth was to step out of the cockpit and smile and sign up for some more flying time. And that is all we would have seen, had we stood and watched him that Wednesday afternoon in the end of July, 1931, at Marshall’s Aerodrome.
But was he really so unmoved by his first solo? We have to leave the aerodrome to find out.
“Half way home, I asked myself alone in the supercilious voice which has so often been used to me, ‘Have you gone solo yet?’
“ ‘Yes.’
“ ‘Have you gone solo?’
“ ‘Yes!’
“ ‘Have you gone solo?’
“ ‘YES!’ ”
Does that sound familiar? Remember when you were learning to fly, driving home after each lesson, that condescending pity you felt for all the other drivers, bound tightly as they were to their little cars and their little highways? “How many of you have been flying just now? How many of you have just looked away out across the horizon, have ten minutes ago won a battle with a fierce crosswind across a narrow runway? None of you, you say? You poor people … I HAVE,” and pulling back the steering wheel of your automobile, you could almost feel her going light on her wheels.
If you remember that time, you have a friend in David Garnett, and to meet him costs a dollar or so in a secondhand bookstore.
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.
There are rafts of flying books left from World War II, but nearly every one of them is absorbed in fact and exciting adventure, and the author shies away from the meaning of the fact, and of what the adventure stands for. Perhaps he is afraid to be thought egotistic, perhaps he has forgotten that each one of us, in the moment that one reaches toward a worthwhile goal, becomes a symbol of all mankind striving. In that moment, the word “I” doesn’t mean a personal, egocentric David Garnett, it means all of us who have loved and wished and struggled to learn, and who have soloed our Moth at last.
There is something about a blend of fact and meaning and pure honesty that gives a book presence, that puts us in that cockpit, for better or worse, heading out to meet our destiny. And when you walk the same path toward destiny with a man, that man is likely to become your friend.
Out of World War II, for instance, we meet a pilot named Bert Stiles, in a book he called Serenade to the Big Bird. The Big Bird is a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, running combat missions out of England in France and Germany.
Flying with Bert Stiles turns us weary to death of war, and of eight hours a day in the right seat, sitting and wrestling with the airplane or sitting and doing nothing while the aircraft commander wrestles with it. The oxygen goes stale in our mask, the flak comes up all black and yellow and silent, the black-cross Messerschmitts a
nd Focke-Wulfs come rolling through us in head-on attacks, yellow fire sparkling from their nose cannon and thuds and splinters through the plane and bombs away and the whole complete entire High Squadron is shot out of the air and a hard thud and orange flame from the right wing and pull the fire handle and feather Four and the Channel at last the beautiful Channel and straight in to land home on the ground and chow without taste and sack without sleep and right away Lieutenant Porada snapping on the light to say Come on breakfast at two-thirty briefing at three-thirty and start engines and takeoff and sitting there in that right seat while the oxygen goes stale in our mask, the flak comes up all black and yellow and silent, the black-cross Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs come rolling through us in head-on attacks, yellow fire sparkling from their nose cannon …
Flying with Stiles, there is no glory, and a bomb run is not even flying. It is a dirty terrible job that’s got to be done.
“It will be a long time before I have made up my mind about this war. I am an American. I was lucky enough to be born below the mountains of Colorado. But someday I would like to be able to say I live in the world and let it go at that.
“If I live through this, I will have to get on the ball and learn something about economics and people and things … In the end it is only people that count, all the people in the whole world. Any land is beautiful to someone, any land is worth fighting for to someone. So it isn’t the land. It is the people. That is what the war is about, I think. Beyond that I can’t go very far.”
After his combat tour in bombers, Stiles volunteered to fly combat in P-51s. On November 21, 1944, he was shot down on an escort mission to Hanover. He was killed at age twenty-three.
But Bert Stiles did not die before he had a chance to arrange some patterns of ink on two hundred pieces of paper, and in that arranging he has become a voice inside our head and sight inside our eyes to see and to wonder and to talk honestly about his own life and therefore about ours.