America from the Air: An Aviator's Story (review)

In the opening scene of a recent movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, one of the young pilot candidates is seen reading Stick and Rudder, the classic work on how to fly by Wolfgang Langewiesche. Problematically, the movie's opening scene was set in 1942; Langewiesche did not publish his book until 1944. However, while the cadet could not have been reading that particular work on his way to flight training, he could have been inspired by the author's earlier book, I'll Take the High Road, published in 1939. Less well known than Stick and Rudder, both that book and a third book, A Flier's World, published in 1951, contain essays discussing Langewiesche's initial experiences as a student and then full-fledged pilot. While Stick and Rudder remains in print, the other two works are far less well known and less readily available.

To introduce Langewiesche's other writings to a contemporary audience, editors Drake Hokanson and Carol Kratz have gathered fifteen essays (fourteen from the 1939 work and one from the 1951 work) in a single volume. America from the Air: An Aviator's Story also includes introductory essays by both editors as well as a foreword by William Langewiesche, Wolfgang's son and a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly.

As suggested by the title, the essays all include passages in which the author describes the landscapes he experiences while flying. Langewiesche, who emigrated to the United States in 1929 at the age of twenty-two, brought a fresh perspective to what was for him the new landscape of the United States. With an intense curiosity about his adopted country, he marveled at features that Americans perhaps took for granted. For example, he was greatly impressed by the straight lines and orderliness imposed on the landscape of the Midwest by the Northwest Ordinance. He delighted in the seacoast, but as a pilot saw less to embrace in rugged stretches of forests and mountains that offered few opportunities for an emergency landing. And, as Charles Lindbergh did in his postwar writings, Langewiesche commented on the changes to the land evident in the rush to the suburbs after World War II.

While the landscape theme is present in the essays, more prominent is Langewiesche's deep passion for flying. To learn to fly, he sacrificed every spare moment, every spare dollar, and even sold his car. Although he could not imagine his life without flying, his was not a romantic, unconditional passion. He also acknowledged the difficulties and dangers of flying, writing of the fiery death that could be the fate of an unwary or unlucky pilot. His passion for flying was also intellectual, and he was especially drawn to the mental challenge of successfully navigating from one place to another by means of dead reckoning, not depending on visible landmarks. He found a certain joy in plotting and following a course, correcting for wind and magnetic drift, and then ending up exactly where he wanted to be exactly when he predicted. Finally, he had a passion for his adopted country. He embraced not only its landscape but also the freedoms and opportunities it afforded.

And Langewiesche wanted to share his passions with others. While acknowledging the difficulties inherent in learning to fly, he believed that many more Americans should and would take to the air. He believed he had found the perfect airplane to help achieve that goal, the Piper J-3 Cub—small, affordable, and easy to fly. While the Cub would not take pilot and passenger very far very fast, Langewiesche saw it as the vehicle that would finally bring about an age when many would discover the joy of flying.

America from the Air's fifteen essays present the work of a man who could be both passionate and highly realistic about the nature of flying as sport, a man with a keen eye for the landscape...