“I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I grew up reading the prose of Antoine de Saint-Exupery. His books, along with those of others, ranging from Gann to Bach, were a large part of what attracted me to a life of flying. It is only recently that I have discovered how closely our lives and our thoughts were aligned. I don’t say this because I think I will ever be as talented a writer as he or half the pilot Saint-Ex was. I believe it because our way of looking at the flying life and the stages we have gone through are so similar as to be eerie.
If you remember your Antoine de Saint-Exupery, you’ll recall that he wrote classics like Courrier-Sud, The Little Prince, Earth Sand and Stars, and Night Flight. You may also remember that he was a pioneer airline pilot with Aerospatiale and that he died mysteriously during a World War Two reconnaissance flight in a P-38 Lightning over the waters near France.
You might not know that the wreckage of his aircraft was discovered in 2004 off the coast of Marseilles. His body was never found, but a bracelet belonging to him washed up in the fishing net of a boat near the area where his plane was last seen in 1944.
Nobody knew exactly how he came to crash until this year. An 88 year old former German Luftwaffe pilot named Horst Rippert has clear memories of shooting down a P-38 in exactly that area on exactly the day that Saint-Ex disappeared. Rippert was actually a fan of Saint-Ex’s writing and says that his flying classmates in Germany loved reading his books.
In the words of Kurt Vonnegut: “So it goes…”
It probably wouldn’t have surprised Saint-Ex that a fan killed him. By that time in his life, his love of flying had changed. He had lived from the very beginnings of aerial warfare when it was exciting to both him and the world to the point of his demise in his mid 40’s when aerial warfare and flying had become less of a poem and more of a sausage grinder.
Romance Youth and Flying
In our youth, both Antoine and I shared an excitement at the process and prospect of war in the air. I grew up hearing tales of World War II flying derring-do from adventure movies and books. Like all children who play at war with plastic guns, counting to ten before you could come alive again, and pretended valor on green grassy fields, I had a young vision of flying fighters, getting the girl, and saving the country.
Saint-Ex underwent the same thing as I except that he was a young man attending school in Paris during the Great War. His letters home to his mother included passages like this after he witnessed a night bombing raid on the city by German Gotha bombers: “I saw an oil depot explode that illuminated the entire sky with an intense red light – One has no idea how much damage they did and above all how many people they killed: it’s fantastic.”
Our growing up in flying was similar to a point. Like him, I was too dense to get into a service academy and began flying as a civilian. I also got caught up in the airline world at an early age and built hours and experience like it was going out of style.
I can’t claim to have flown the Sahara in an open cockpit biplane, but in my own way with flights to exotic locales like Shreveport and Amarillo, I too had my share of the excitement of carrying the mails.
In the latter parts of both our airline careers, we were relegated to the role of writers for our respective companies. He hated his time in the front office at least as much as I did and like me, he escaped it as soon as he could. Living a life among people who think a good memo is a good day in aviation is soul-killing.
As a pilot moves through his life from dewy-eyed teen to gray haired wrinkled senior captain, his love for flying changes. It is very much I think like a long-term marriage. You can’t be all starry-eyed and living in each other’s pockets for fifty years. Marriage and flying just don’t work that way. As you get older and more experienced in both endeavors, you learn that there is a certain comfort and warmth to long lived intimacy at a close, but comfortable, distance.
In both aviation and married life you still retain what attracted you to your love in the first place but have years of hard-earned experience that tempers the ardor somewhat – but in a good way. In other words, you might not stay awake thinking about flying or your significant other like you did during those breathy days of first love and first solo, but you have learned to enjoy and deeply appreciate a quiet night of restful sleep with no snoring or engine failures.
Like me, by mid-life, Saint-Ex had been around aviation long enough to feel a little jaded by it. Even Lindbergh felt that way in the same stage of his career. He also had made the transition from the poetry of flight to the daily grind it can sometimes be. While checking out in B-24’s during World War II, Lindbergh had this to say about what flying had become for him: “It has passed from an era of the pioneer to an era of the routine operator.” He knew he could fly the B-24, but he wasn’t completely sure that he could fly it “according to the ideas of the inspector whose entire life is wound around regulations and conventional airways procedures.”
Personally, I don’t think I have ever read a better description of what airline, military and even general aviation has become today.
Flying: a Spiritual Quest?
I began flying as a romantic, almost spiritual endeavor. I literally heard the tied-down airplanes talk to me at night as they rocked back and forth in their ropes and chocks. The scent of airplanes, both old and new, with their combination of non-detergent oil and heated glare shields were as intoxicating to me as any perfume on the cutest girl at a ninth grade dance.
Like Saint-Ex, I knew there was poetry to flight and that flying was something far bigger and better than a fast way to reach spring break or a good way to kill the Viet Cong.
Antoine suffered a little disillusionment just as I did with flying and at about the same time in life. My struggles had to do with the responsibility of flying three hundred people with little company support or encouragement. He dealt with similar airline management types – people who wouldn’t know art or beauty if it sat on their noses – and also had to come to grips with flying to kill during World War II when he returned to Europe from the United States to fly for the Free French.
Saint-Ex summed up his fading romance with aviation by writing: “I hate my epoch with all my heart. Man is dying out of spiritual thirst. One can’t live any more on refrigerators, politics, games and cross-word puzzles, you know! One can’t go on this way. One can’t live without poetry, color, or love…”
Love Lost can equal Love Found
Antoine de Saint-Exupery unfortunately never made the transition from his tired acceptance of flying back to the love I feel for it today. You see, Horst Rippert inadvertently made that impossible the day he shot down the P-38 over Marseilles.
I did live long enough to love again.
My new-found romantic love affair with flying began like most true love stories do – I had to give something up. In my case, I had to give up flying for my airline because of a combination of illness and early retirement as the management team there went about killing the soul of the company along with its financial base.
I was far luckier than Saint-Ex. I came through the illness and the unpleasantness of it all and have rediscovered the joy that flying, open-windowed, at 70 knots can bring on a warm summer day.
So, you see? My tale is far less epic than Antoine’s, but much happier in both content and outcome. Flying never was and never should be about how big an airplane you can fly or how much money you can make flying it. It should never be about how many cities you can flatten with its bombs or how lucky we are in America because we can kill our enemies overseas without them ever seeing the pilot who is flying the attack from an air conditioned trailer in Montana.
Aviating through the skies, above the common and mundane and up where only angels and giant cloud anvils exist is an adventure and a magical experience.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery loved it, wrote about it and by the time of his unfortunate death at the hands of a fellow aviator and fan fell into a somber, but peaceful coexistence with flying.
I have had the privilege of loving it, losing it and loving it again. This time I won’t forget the magic and get tied up in how many credit hours I can score a month to make the pay cap. This time I intend to enjoy every moment that the gods of aviation allow me with my paramour and friend – a nice, old and slow airplane.
