good reading?
I haven't read these books myself....but these excerpts sound pretty good.......Randy
night flight to Benghazi
In the air. Two hours of sunlight left. I've already put down my sunglasses as we approach Tripolis. The sand is taking on a golden shine. My God, this planet is desolate! Once more it seems to me that the rivers, the green cool shadows and the homes of people only exist by grace of a happy conjunction of circumstances. What space these rocks and sand take up!
The whole landscape below is as yet bathed in a pale light, but is fading just the same, bit by bit. I know nothing, truly nothing, that can compare to this hour. Those that have felt the strange love for flying will understand.
I slowly withdraw from the sunlight. I leave behind the large golden fields that could have offered me shelter if the aircraft would fail me. I go into the night. I push on. Only the stars can guide me now.
Antoine de saint-Exupéry, Terre des hommes (Wind, sand and stars) (1939)
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pass to the South Pole
Soon the Queen Maud Mountains loom ahead, ranked in stately file against the horizon; here and there the brilliant blue flash of glacial ice lights dark gaps in the range. It is a land of a million years ago, right out of the ice age.
Ahead lies the big decision. One approach to the Pole is over the Axel Heiberg Glacier, the pass which Amundsen chose. Its summit is hidden in clouds. The other approach is over the Liv Glacier to its right, named by Amundsen for Dr. Nansen's daughter, and completely unsurveyed. The summit is clear; we decide to swing right.
The Liv Glacier is like a great frozen waterfall, halted in the midst of its tumbling cascade and immobilized for all eternity. Sheer cliffs rise above us on either side, and the canyon narrows as we wind our way upward. A cataract of ice looms ahead, and there is no room to turn around now. We are at 8,200 ft, just about the Ford's ceiling with its present loading. I wave frantically to catch the attention of Harold June, who is bent over his radio, and point to the emergency food. He kicks one of the 150-pound sacks through the trapdoor, and the plane lifts just enough to clear the barrier.
A final icy wall blocks our way, steeper than all the others. A torrent of air is pouring over its top, the plane bucking violently in the downdraft, and our rate of climb is zero. June jettisons the second sack, and the Ford staggers a little higher, but still not enough. There is only one thing left to try. Perhaps at the very edge of the downdraft is a reverse current of air, like a back-eddy along the bank of a rushing river.
I inch my way to the side of the canyon, our right wing almost scraping the cliff, and all at once we are wrenched upward, shooting out of the maelstrom of winds, and soar over the summit with a couple of hundred feet to spare.
Bernt Balchen, Come north with me (1959)
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the third dimension
To fly! to live as airmen live! Like them to ride the skyways from horizon to horizon, across rivers and forests! To free oneself from the petty disputes of everyday life, to be active, to feel the blood renewed in one's vein ? ah! that is life... Life is finer and simpler. My will is freer. I appreciate everything more, sunlight and shade, work and my friends. The sky is vast. I breathe deep gulps of the fine clear air of the heights. I feel myself to have achieved a higher state of physical strength and a clearer brain. I am living in the third dimension!
Henri Mignoèt, Le Sport de l'Air (1934)
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slow-motion pictures
Just a casual trip from New York to Washington. I could sit quite still and let the roar of the engine cover me like music. The vibration hummed in the soles of my feet, and was satisfying as a hearth fire or rain on the roof. Contented, I could look down at that calm clear world below.
A new world too, it was, for I had not flown in many months and the objects below me wore the freshly painted vividness of things seen for the first time. They passed, bright and irrelevant images, slowly under the still suspended wheel of our plane. The images that attracted me were unrelated and scattered, not strung along one thread by a road. (The pencil-marked shadows of telegraph poles. The neatly combed fields. Docks and piers and bridges, flat slabs laid on the edge of a mirror. Cities, sudden flashes from an apartment window or a moving car, like a bright speck of glass in a road, sparkling far beyond its worth. How slowly those little cars crawl along the narrow ribbon paths!)
And looking down on those little houses, those little paths, the narrow lines of black beetles, the anthill traffic of cars, one sat back and wondered, 'Why? What do we do this for? Why isn't life simple and still and quiet? Was I really there yesterday? What was I doing?'
One could sit still and look at life from the air; that was it. And I was conscious again of the fundamental magic of flying, a miracle that has nothing to do with any of its practical purposes - speed, accessibility, and convenience - and will not change as they change. Looking down from the air that morning, I felt that stillness rested like a light over the earth. What motion there was took on a slow grace, like slow-motion pictures which catch the moment of outstretched beauty that one cannot see in life itself, so swiftly does it move.
And if flying, like a glass-bottomed bucket, can give you that vision, that seeing eye, which peers down to the still world below the choppy waves - it will always remain magic.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, North to the orient (1935)
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