A Gift of Wings

In The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry lays out the idea of this special kind of friendship that airplane pilots can have with other pilots who have written of flight.

“ ‘Here is my secret,’ said the fox to the little prince, ‘a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.’

“ ‘What is essential is invisible to the eye,’ the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.”

Saint-Ex writes of you and me, who are drawn to flight in the same way that he was drawn to it, and we look for the same friends within it. Without seeing that invisible, without recognizing that we have more in common with Saint-Exupéry and David Garnett and Bert Stiles and Richard Hillary and Ernest Gann than we have with our next-door neighbor, we have left them all untamed, and they are no more friends than a hundred thousand unknown faces are friends. But as we get to know that real man who is set down on paper, that man to whom the living mortal devoted his lifetime, each of these becomes, for us, unique in all the world. What is essential about them, and about us, is not seen with eyes.

We are friend to a man not because he has brown hair or blue eyes or a scar on his chin from an old airplane crash, but because he dreams the same dreams, because he loves the same good and hates the same evil. Because he likes to listen to the sound of an engine ticking over on a warm, quiet morning.

Facts alone are meaningless.

FACT: The man who wore the uniform of commandant in the French Air Force, who carried a flight log written with seven thousand hours and the name Saint-Exupéry, did not return from a reconnaissance flight over his homeland.

FACT: Luftwaffe Intelligence officer Hermann Korth, on the evening of July 31, 1944, the evening when Saint-Exupéry’s was the only aircraft missing, copies a message—“Report by telephone … destruction of a reconnaissance plane which fell in flames into the sea.”

FACT: Hermann Korth’s library in Aix-la-Chapelle, with its honored shelf for the books of Saint-Exupéry, was destroyed by Allied bombs.

FACT: None of this destroyed Saint-Exupéry. Not bullets in his engine or flames in his cockpit or bombs tearing his books to shreds, for the real Saint-Ex, the real David Garnett, the real Bert Stiles are not flesh and they are not paper. They are a special way of thinking, much like our own way of thinking, perhaps, but still, like our prince’s fox, unique in all the world.

And meaning?

These men, the only part of them that is real and lasting, are alive today. If we seek them out, we can watch with them and laugh with them and learn with them. Their logbooks melt into ours, and our flying and our living grows richer for knowing them.

The only way that these men can die is for them to be utterly forgotten. We must do for our friends what they have done for us—we must help them to live. On a chance that you may not have met one or two of them, will you allow me the honor of introductions?

MR. HARALD PENROSE, No Echo in the Sky (Arno Press, Inc.)

MR. RICHARD HILLARY, The Last Enemy (also published with the title Falling through Space)

FLT. LT. JAMES LIEWELLEN RHYS, England Is My Village (Books for Libraries, Inc.)

MRS. MOLLY BERNHEIM, A Sky of My Own (Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.)

MR. ROALD DAHL, Over to You

MISS DOT LEMON, One-One

SIR FRANCIS CHICHESTER, Alone over the Tasman Sea

MR. GILL ROBB WILSON, The Airman’s World

MR. CHARLES A. LINDBERGH, The Spirit of St. Louis (Charles Scribner’s Sons)

MRS. ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH, North to the Orient (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.)

MR. NEVIL SHUTE, Round the Bend, The Rainbow and the Rose, Pastoral (Ballantine Books, Inc.)

MR. GUY MURCHIE, Song of the Sky (Houghton Mifflin Company)

MR. ERNEST K. GANN, Blaze of Noon (Ballantine Books, Inc.), Fate Is the Hunter (Simon & Schuster, Inc., Ballantine Books, Inc.)

MR. ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPERY, Wind, Sand and Stars (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.), The Little Prince (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.)

If the book is in print, the publisher is listed. Otherwise look in libraries and secondhand bookstores.

A light in the toolbox

That which a man believes, the philosophers say, is that which becomes his reality. So it was for years as I said over and again “I’m no mechanic,” I was no mechanic. As I said “I don’t even know which end of the screwdriver to hit the nail with,” I closed a whole world of light from myself. There had to be somebody else to work on my airplanes, or I couldn’t fly.