The Wild Blue Yonder: The Picador Book of Aviation
Ed. Graham Coster (Picador)
Virgin Galactic told its 700 would-be astronauts last month that its passenger rocket plane should get into space within the next few months. If it does, this excellent anthology might need updating. As it is, with everything from W B Yeats to Tom Wolfe by way of Biggles, it’s the perfect rejoinder to Paul Theroux’s assertion that “there is not much to say about airplane journeys”.
Beyond the Blue Horizon by Alexander Frater (Penguin)
Alexander Frater’s first flight, on December 31 1946, a few days before his ninth birthday, was on an Empire flying boat from Sydney to Fiji. In the Eighties, he set out to try to recapture the romance of it, following the Imperial Airways route from London to Brisbane in the Thirties. His booklet of tickets was “probably the largest ever issued on British Airways coupons”.
TransAtlantic by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury)
Through the lives of a fictional family, McCann links three episodes from history: the first non-stop transatlantic flight, in 1919; the visit of a freed American slave to Ireland; and Senator George Mitchell’s peace-broking in Nineties Belfast. The re-creation of the Alcock and Brown flight in their Vickers Vimy is a feat of imagination in which the author inhabits the aviators’ minds.
Aloft by William Langewiesche (Penguin Modern Classics)
Before writing for Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair, Langewiesche worked as a pilot for 15 years from the age of 18, so editors have pushed him towards aviation. In these essays, he considers how we move about the earth and view our place within it. Some frightening, some reassuring, all are “suffused with the wonder I still feel that as a species we now find ourselves in the sky”.
West with the Night by Beryl Markham (North Point Press/Macmillan)
Beryl Markham (1902-86) grew up in Kenya, hunting with the Maasai, worked as a bush pilot and became the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo from east to west. Her memoir culminates with that feat and her Zen-like response when her engine cut out. Hemingway said she “can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers… It really is a bloody wonderful book.”
Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Penguin Modern Classics)
Saint-Exupéry (1900-44) might not have been a model pilot, prone as he was to daydreaming at the controls and near-fatal crashes, but he made poetry of his experience. This book of his years flying airmail routes across the Sahara and the Andes finishes with his miraculous survival after a crash in the Liyban desert in 1936 while he was trying to break the Paris-Saigon record.
UK Edition
