Books: Popular Flying

I’LL TAKE THE HIGH ROAD—Wolfgang Langewiesche—Harcourf, Brace ($2.50).

“Flying,” writes Wolfgang Langewiesche, “is now possible for any person of normal intelligence who is in good health and is financially able to eat regularly.” It costs $275 or less to build up the flying time required for a private license.* Thanks to the light loads their large wings carry, “light planes,” which commercial pilots call flivvers, pop-bottles, and of which an unprecedented 2,500 are being turned out this year, are all but foolproof. They cost as little as $1,098 new, far less at secondhand, may be hired at 4¢ per seat per mile. In one such, Langewiesche flew from New York to Key West. The cost of fuel, oil, hangars, a standard 20-hour engine check, was $21.50.

In a sense Author Langewiesche’s informative, engaging book is merely a skilful advertisement for flying-for-the-fun-of-it and for the planes which make such flying possible. But the author’s enthusiasm alone is more than disarming on that score. What he has done is simply to give a deftly selective account of his own career as an impecunious amateur: the virginal application for lessons; first flight cross-country, by dead reckoning; a siege of “aero-neurosis,” parachuting, a flight along the desolate eastward shelf of the continent. By the time he is done he has set straight a number of groundling misapprehensions, has clearly suggested a seeing and reading of a world no groundling can know, has need neither to explain his own love of flying nor to persuade others.

I’ll Take the High Road is capable of interesting a far more general, more sedentary audience than those whose interest in flying is already active. For Author Langewiesche has an uncommon talent for conveying, not merely describing, physical sensations. He is, moreover, both as airman and writer, a skilled amateur, with the wisdom never to desert his amateur standing. Of the 25 photographs, most are well above the shoddy average for book illustration, a few are magically good.

*For the license itself, as for registration, Government inspection, no charge is made.