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Review of Wolfgang Langewiesche's America from the Air |
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Don Maxwell - Apr 08,2018
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Have you been longing for a truly pleasant book about flying that you'll enjoy reading and approve of from a pilot's perspective--and so will thoughtful people who are not-pilots? This is it: Wolfgang Langewiesche's America from the Air.
It's MUCH more readable than his Stick and Rudder (which I have two copies of and re-read occasionally).
In Stick and Rudder Langewiesche seems thoroughly human and thoughtful, but always just a bit formidable--An Authority Talking.
The Langewiesche in America from the Air never seems formidable at all--probably because it's autobiographical, not instructive. It's the story of how he learned to fly--he soloed in 1934--and his early experiences as a pilot, and how he came to love flying low and slow in small landplanes that flew a lot like Seareys.
Maybe the best thing I can say about it is that toward the end I found myself reading slower and slower, skipping whole days between pages, because I didn't want it to end.
Here's a little excerpt--the story of how in the late 1930s he met Al Bennett and rented a Cub to fly from New Jersey to Key West. It's around the middle of the book (pp 121-123), after Langewiesche has struggled to find enough money for flying lessons and has done a few short cross-country flights, but most of his flying experience has been around and around in airport traffic patterns. At the time, Al Bennett had begun selling and renting the LSAs of the day, small, slow airplanes like Piper Cubs and had become somewhat notorious for his ads in popular magazines:
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Now, when my flying had again come to a dead end and I wanted again to travel cross-country, I did some independent thinking. I decided it would be cheap, small planes for me, or no airplanes at all. I went to Roosevelt Field to try to hire one for a cross-country trip from one of the air service operators who had recently given in to the trend and bought one. "How about letting me fly this thing up to Boston and back?" I had said.
     The owner had been embarrassed, as if I had said something indecent. "Why, it would take you all day," and that had been a clear refusal. Being an old timer, he didn't ask himself what was wrong with taking all day for the round trip, seeing that a car took almost all day for the one-way trip.
     I went to Floyd Bennett Field, to a man whose ships I had flown; he didn't believe in lightplanes for cross-country--not safe, he said; the least bit of a headwind, and you ran out of fuel. I went to Flushing: ships were insured only for airport flying. And on Long Island, I went to still another outfit: Cross-country? They didn't even have a compass in the ship.
     Finally, I decided to see the man behind the folksy ads. I found him, way out in the New ]ersey countryside near Princeton, on his field; it was apparently just an ordinary cow pasture with one small hangar on it of corrugated tin, a wooden shack for an office, a few gasoline cans lying around, and a dozen of the small bigwinged fellows sitting in the grass.
     Could this sort of ship be flown cross-country at all? I asked him.
     Of course, they could. Why not? Seventy miles an hour was seventy miles.
     "Minus headwinds," I said thoughtfully.
     "... plus tailwinds," he answered, bristling for his ships. If you got up early and and flew till sundown, you still could cover a lot of country. Why, where did I want to go?
     Actually my dream was to fly the whole Atlantic Coast, down to Key West and up to Bar Harbor. But it seemed a bit wild.
     I said, "I had thought maybe of Washington."
     "Sure," said Al Bennett, "I often send my students to Washington."
     "How about Richmond?" I said, feeling my way.
     "Let me see your log book," said Al Bennett, and leafed through it for a while. "Sure," he decided.
     “As a matter of fact," I said, "I have sometimes thought of Charleston." He seemed to become more interested rather than less.
     "Why not?" he said; "that is the kind of thing people ought to do."
     "How about Miami?" I asked. He thought that sounded like a lot of fun. "You ought to fly out and see Key West," he said.
     “A lot of water there between the Islands," I said, to show him how conservative I was.
     "That's all right, you aren't proposing to walk across, are you?" he said.
     "What happens if the engine quits°?"
     "That engine quit?" he said, and gave a grunt of disdain.
     We went up together to check me out, and from then on, that New Jersey meadow with the one hangar was my home field. The small light airplane became my kind of ship, and a very different style of flying it was.
In the conventional sense, that cow pasture was perhaps the least interesting spot between New York and Philadelphia. There seldom were spectators; no newsreel man had even thought of catching any of the activities. There were no sleek airliners, no modernistic buildings, no flavor of long-distance travel; there wasn't any of that sense of a future in the process of coming to pass that you sometimes get.
     In all those senses, it was like no airport at all, but mild; more like some concession on the park lagoon where one can rent a rowboat by the hour. Why, it was almost like a grocery store—when you got through flying, they rang up your bill on a cash register.
     The only thing about the field that was in the grand old style of flying was Al Bennett himself, the man who owned and ran it: tall, of military bearing, and with a twirled mustache, he might have been a test pilot of the kind you see in the movies. And for himself, he was as proud and cocky a man as you will find, a skillful pilot and a daring one; once in a while he would go up in an old powerful biplane he kept just for that purpose, and roll himself over upside down, for old memories' sake. But that was strictly private. As a business man, he promoted quite a different idea of flying.
     It was the usual flying field idea in reverse. Instead of keeping prices up and guarding the prestige of his art, he made his living by democratizing. He believed that the air age was at hand and his vision of it was in the best American tradition; the Good Thing, brought Within the Reach of All. He had jumped off the deep end. He must make the public accept piloting and the small personal airplane as it had accepted the automobile, or else lose money. When you looked at his field you had to know all that; you had to understand the intention. If you did, you could see there a most remarkable sight: the people flying; thirty years after Kitty Hawk, the common man taking to the air.
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You can read more about Al Bennett, his vision, and his enthusiastic ads in the February 1939 Popular Aviation (now called Flying): (CLICK HERE. It may open in another window or tab.)
And you can read other parts of America from the Air at Amazon: (CLICK HERE. It may open in another window or tab.)
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Bill Brown - Apr 08,2018
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Gotta get that book Don, Thanks.
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Don Maxwell - Apr 09,2018
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I hope you enjoy it, Bill. Just be prepared for autobiography (memoir, actually) not a murder mystery, or anything like that.
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