A Gift of Wings

You look at aviation and you can’t help wondering. There is so much going on all at once, and the whole thing is so foreign and complicated, and there are so many roaring individualists there, all railing at each other over tiny differences of opinion.

Why would anyone, you ask, deliberately dive into that maelstrom, just to become an airplane pilot?

At the question, the tumult stops instantly. In the dead silence, the pilots stare at you for not knowing the clearly obvious.

“Why, flying saves time, that’s why,” says the business pilot, at last.

“Because it’s fun, and no other reason matters,” says the sport pilot.

“Dummies!” says the professional pilot. “Everybody knows that this is the best way in the world to make a living!”

Then the others are at it again, all talking at once, and then shouting for your attention.

“Cargo to haul!”

“Crops to spray!”

“Places to go!”

“People to carry!”

“Deals to close!”

“Sights to see!”

“Appointments to keep!”

“Races to win!”

“Things to learn!”

They are at each other’s throats once more, snarling over which part of the gold of flight gleams more brightly than any other. You can only shrug your shoulders, walk sadly off, and say, “What could I expect? They’re all out of their minds.”

You speak more truly than you might think. The government of pure reason departs when an airplane enters the scene. It is no secret knowledge, for instance, that a tremendous number of business airplanes are purchased because someone in the company likes airplanes and wants one around. Given the desire, it is a simple matter to justify the company’s ownership of the airplane, because an airplane is also a very useful, time-saving, moneymaking business tool. But the desire came first, and then, later, the reasons were trotted out.

On the other hand, there are still some company executives whose fear of airplanes is as irrational as the affection of others, and despite time or money, saved or earned, have it clearly understood that their company will positively have nothing to do with any flying machines.

For a great many people around the world, an airplane has a special charm that time cannot dissolve, and a simple test illustrates the point. How many things are there on earth today, dear reader, that you truly and deeply want to own, with that same intense longing-to-possess that you had for that metallic blue Harley-Davidson when you just turned sixteen?

So often, as we grow, we lose the capacity to want things. Most pilots are absolutely uncaring about the kind of automobile they drive, the precise form of the house they live in, or the shape and color of the world about them. Whether or not they have or don’t have any particular material thing is not of earth-shaking importance. Yet it is common to hear those very men openly hungering after one specific airplane, and to see them making huge sacrifices for it.

Rationally speaking, most pilots can’t afford to own the airplanes that they do. They give up a second car, a new house, gold, bowling, and three years lunch just to keep that Cessna 140 or a used Piper Comanche waiting for them in the hangar. They want these airplanes, and they want them almost desperately. More than the Harley-Davidson.

The world of flight is a world in its youth, that is ruled by emotion and hard impulsive attachments to airplanes and ideas about airplanes. It is a world that has so many things to see and do that it hasn’t had time for mature reflection about itself, and because of this, like any youth, it is none too sure of its own meaning or reason for its existence.

There is a tremendous difference, for instance, between “Aviation” and “Flying,” a difference so vast that they are virtually two separate worlds, with precious little of anything in common.

Aviation, far and away the largest of the two, comprises the airplanes and airmen who have interests beyond themselves. Aviation’s big advantage is the obvious one: airplanes can compress a very large distance into a very small one. If New York is just across the street from Miami, one might cross that street three or four times a week, just for the change of scenery and climate. The Aviation enthusiasts find that not only is New York just across the street, but so are Montreal, Phoenix, New Orleans, Fairbanks, and La Paz.

They find that after a very modest amount of training in the not-too-difficult mechanics of the airplane and the not-too-complicated element of the air, they can constantly feed their insatiable appetite for new sights, new sounds, for new things happening that have never happened before. Aviation offers Atlanta today, St. Thomas tomorrow, Sun Valley the next day, and Disneyland the next. In Aviation, an airplane is a clever swift traveling device that lets you have lunch in Des Moines and supper in Las Vegas. The whole planet is nothing but a great feast of delicious places for the Aviation enthusiast, and every day for as long as he lives he can savor another delicate new flavor of it.

To the Aviator, then, the faster and more comfortable his airplane, and the simpler it is to fly, the better suited it is to his use. The sky is the same sky everywhere, and it is simply the medium through which the Aviator moves to reach his destination. The sky is nothing more than a street, and no one pays any attention to the street, as long as it leads to far Xanadu.

The Flyer, however, is a different creature entirely from the Aviator. The man who is concerned with Flying isn’t concerned with distant places off over the horizon, but with the sky itself; not with shrinking distance into an hour’s airplane travel, but with the incredible machine that is the airplane itself. He moves not through distance, but through the ranges of satisfaction that come from hauling himself up into the air with complete and utter control; from knowing himself and knowing his airplane so well that he can come somewhere close to touching, in his own special and solitary way, that thing that is called perfection.

Aviation, with its airways and electronic navigation stations and humming autopilots, is a science. Flying, with its chugging biplanes and swift racers, with its aerobatics and its soaring, is an art. The Flyer, whose habitat is most often the cockpit of a tailwheel airplane, is concerned with slips and spins and forced landings from low altitude. He knows how to fly his airplane with the throttle and the cabin doors; he knows what happens when he stalls out of a skid. Every landing is a spot landing for him, and he growls if he does not touch down smoothly three-point, with his tailwheel puffing a little cloud of lime-dust from his target on the grass.

Flying prevails whenever a man and his airplane are put to a test of maximum performance. The sailplane on its thermal, trying to stay in the air longer than any other sailplane, using every particle of rising air to its best advantage, is Flying. The big war-surplus Mustangs and Bearcats, moaning four hundred miles per hour down their racing straightaways and brushing the checkered-canvas pylons on the turns, are Flying. That lonely little biplane way up high in a distant summer afternoon, practicing barrel rolls over and over and over again, is Flying. Flying, once again, is overcoming not the distance from here to Nantucket, but the distance from here to perfection.