When flight was young

THE SPECTACLE OF FLIGHT: AVIATION AND THE WESTERN IMAGINATION, 1920-1950

By Robert Wohl

Yale, $39.95, 364 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY RON LAURENZO

When did we get bored with aviation? When did flying, for the general public, at least, become passe, simply another choice in getting from point A to point B? Those questionsbecome moot in the pages of Robert Wohl’s latest history of flight, a luscious read taking us back to a time when the bloom was still very much on the aviation rose. “The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920-1950” is a cultural history, a term that may appear oxymoronic nowadays, when air travel often conjures images of cramped seats and tedious security checks, to say nothing of jail sentences for drunk pilots and airline bankruptcy proceedings.

So it may come as a surprise to more jaded collectors of frequent-flyer miles that airplanes — yes, even ones with propellers and without air conditioning or personal entertainment systems — once inspired men and women, and especially intellectuals, to dream. Sensitive and passionate about his subjects, Mr. Wohl portrays pilots, authors, movie directors, actors and artists in vivid detail, often in their own words, always with scrupulous support from their own works. This is not a technical history, but one of those rare gems that brings to life an achingly beautiful epoch disintegrated by the ordinary forward march of progress and the cataclysm of 1939-1945.

In those decades between the world wars, people attached a special meaning to flight. Some, such as Charles Lindbergh and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, saw in airplanes a miraculous invention capable of uniting people around the world like nothing else. They transcended their time thanks to their flying (and writing) exploits, risking everything to develop the airplane into a safe, practical mode of transportation. That they were disappointed with the final result says something interesting about human nature, something to which Mr. Wohl pays ample attention. But I think most of us would rather fly over the North Atlantic in a Boeing 767, sipping a drink while reading Lindbergh’s account of his flight in the “Spirit of St. Louis” than experience that harrowing trip on our own.

On a darker note, Mr. Wohl accounts how fascists in Italy and Germany saw pilots as the vanguard of a new superman — an idea they were not alone in sharing —and achievements in aviation as fundamental building blocs of their authoritarian societies. Not to take anything away from Italians, but most readers will be surprised, perhaps delighted as well, to read about the prominent part they played in the early days of transoceanic flight and even aerial military theory. That these efforts were encouraged and guided by Mussolini and his ilk is, well, just another intriguing part of the story.

Mr. Wohl goes into fascinating depth about the artists and architects who found the muse for their own creations in the sleek lines of craft such as the DC-3 and Lockheed Constellation. The maturation of the airplane coincided with rise of mass culture and blossoming of cinema — making aviators’ names, and for the first time ever their faces, known to millions around the world. And the film industry cranked out movies about flight one after the other, to satisfy a public that enjoyed such movies. Hollywood’s love affair with the airplane — both were young and reckless — has never been repeated. Legendary actors such as Clark Gable, Cary Grant and Gary Cooper began their careers in films that shaped an entire generation’s concept of pilots and planes. The chapter on film includes detailed descriptions about the creation of numerous films, including “Wings,” “Hell’s Angels” and “Ceiling Zero.” “It is difficult for us to appreciate this today because the airplane has been reduced to a faster way of getting from one place to another,” the author writes. “How strange to think that men and women once believed that flying was a sacred and transcendent calling that more than justified its cost in lives.”

Aviation was really the bomb, if you’ll pardon the expression, figuratively at first and then literally in the Spanish Civil War and World War II — subjects Mr. Wohl examines in detail. Average citizens idolized record-setting aviators, making them the rock stars of their day — although it is arguable whether any rock star, even Elvis Presley or the Beetles at the tops of their game, ever made quite the impact that Lindbergh did when he landed in Paris in 1927.

While Lindbergh is a towering figure of that time, Mr. Wohl gives equal emphasis to his European contemporaries, men like Jean Mermoz whose exploits flying the mail from France through Africa and into Argentina in the late 1920s inspired writers such as Joseph Kessel and Saint-Exupery to elevate the French airline Aeropostale to legendary status. That mention of Aeropostale today mainly conjures images of overpriced clothes for teenagers is, in some small sense, a tragedy.

So when did flying become just another form of travel? The short answer is when it started becoming safe and reliable, more or less, in the 1930s. For the pioneers who had risked their lives in open cockpits on almost every flight, the advent of better engines and navigation systems, autopilots and, most of all, the bureaucratization of the sky, throttled the original freedom and romance of flight. The aircraft’s coming of age as an instrument of mass murder in World War II, although not unexpected, put the final kibosh on many of those romantic dreams.

But while the pioneers agonized over the loss of aviation’s innocence, their children and grandchildren adapted quite nicely to the new world they opened, embracing the shrinkage of time and space and accepting, or ignoring, the airplane’s vast destructive potential.

In the span of half a century, flight — on major Western airlines, at least — became the safest form of transportation ever. Sure, we take for granted this incredible capability which would stun our counterparts of the 1920s. But the loss of the sensual pleasures of flight, the fact that the modern airline captain is, except for takeoff and landing, more a systems manager than a pilot, are small prices to pay for safety and reliability. There are tens of thousands of airline flights every day in the United States alone, where jet aircraft flown by major airlines have not suffered a single fatal crash in more than three years. That would impress even depressed romantics like Kessel and Saint-Exupery.

Besides, for those who want something different, romance, excitement or whatever, there are always ultralights, gliders, seaplanes and aerobatic planes. My own experience flying a Piper Super Cub with the door open over the Montana wilderness is proof, to me at least, that the soul of aviation as perceived by men and women like Lindbergh — the beauty, the pilot’s special relationship with nature, even a little of the danger — is still there for those who care to seek it.

We are fortunate to enjoy the best of all aviation worlds, a situation bound to only get better, and one we appreciate more thanks to works like “Spectacle of Flight.”

Ron Laurenzo is a writer and pilot living in Maryland.