Could life be anything but sweet
when all is hazardous and new?
- Nevil Shute quoting E.F.A. Geach, Slide rule (1954)
Flying used to fire the imagination in a major way and heroes were made of this. Those early pilots were unmistakebly remarkable people, did not one but several remarkable things, and best of all, they wrote about it. Then, in the age of rockets, they became suddenly out-dated, archaic, forgotten.
Their dusty biographies, leftovers from another era's enthusiasm, paint a wonderful picture of pre-fifties flying and living! The quotes and scraps of stories here are a personal selection from these texts.
They give you the roar of a plane climbing from the earth, leaving. A roaring symbol for all things technical and futuristic. The keyword here is old-fashioned text about life during a high-tech revolution (try substitute 'plane' for 'puter'). Oh, sweet start-up sound.
Enjoy - browse some excerpts by way of the contents menu below, or (new!) look for a specific pilot's description under the link 'biographies' at the end of this page.
contents
a little lost beginning
(pioneering aviation)
the land over the hill
(flying as travel)
scenes of war
(pilots at war)
the future lives in a cloud
(love of flying)
random observations
(typically biography)
specials
(temporary items)