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09/07 - The Armchair Pilot

A sky made of words
By David Hipschman
David is EAA’s Director of Publications and Editor of Sport Aviation Magazine

It’s mid-September and where I live in central Wisconsin, about an hour’s drive west of Oshkosh, I’m thinking about winter. We’ve already had hard frost. Weekends involve “The Winter Is Coming Checklist” (get furnace filters, check anti-freeze in all the vehicles; ask kids who took my good gloves) and the joy of firewood stacking.

At the airport, after a recent flight for pancakes at an EAA chapter’s breakfast, I winterized my unheated hangar by taking home things that will freeze. I’ve installed the oil-cooler winterization plate on my Cherokee, and stashed my survival pack and sleeping bag in the back seat. The breaker bar I use to crack the ice that will soon collect along the base of the hangar door is ready, leaning in the corner, next to the snow shovel and a sack of urea fertilizer that will melt ice without harming aluminum.

The days are shorter and getting more so. But flying has gotten better as temperatures drop, replacing the tumult of autumnal thunderstorms with a more stable and still ocean of air. Soon, in winter’s grip of ice and snow, lowered ceilings and gray, the good days for flying hereabout will be fewer and separated more widely by time grounded by weather.

It is then that I fly only in my mind, from my chair by the fire, in a sky made of words. Here is a small, personal selection from my bookshelf that has helped me over the years get past the days when only the ducks - and professionals - are aloft:

Ernest K. Gann, Fate Is the Hunter, 1961, Simon & Shuster. This is Gann’s autobiography, but it reads as well as any fiction. It is among the best books about flying, the early history of airlines, and the making of a professional pilot that has ever seen print.

Richard Bach, Stranger to the Ground, 1963, Harper & Row. Bach is among the most lyrical and spiritual of aviation writers. This book chronicles his experiences piloting an F-84F Thunderstreak as an Air National Guard pilot over Europe during the Cold War. His insights into the “brotherhood” of combat flying can be read both as an anti-war message as well as an evocation of what all pilots - whatever their politics or duty to their nation - share.

Alexander Frater, Beyond the Blue Horizon, 1986, Penguin Books. Frater was a travel writer for the London Observer, and he is the only nonpilot on this little list. This nonfiction gem travels from London to Brisbane, Australia, on the old Imperial Airways route via Paris, Athens, Cairo, Baghdad, Bombay, Bangkok, Singapore, and Jakarta. His depiction of air travel aboard aircraft like the Handley Page, de Havilland Express, and Armstrong Whitworths AW15s, on what was the world’s longest, most adventurous scheduled air route, is aviation travel writing at its best.

Frederick Forsyth, The Shepherd, 1975, Viking Press. Forsyth, who was the youngest fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force, is better known for blockbusters like The Day of the Jackal. This brilliantly illustrated short novel was written as a Christmas gift to his wife. It is the tale of an RAF Vampire jet pilot lost over the North Sea on Christmas Eve in 1957 and his mysterious encounter with a de Havilland Mosquito.

See How It Flies is an unusual and useful “book” about flying by FAA Aviation Safety Counselor John S. Denker, which you can read at www.AV8N.com/how.

If you have special books that you use to get through those days when you can’t fly, please let us know about them. Here’s how…..