What's Next, Ridley?

One day, my uncle and I were perched at the top of “Number 9 Express,” at the top of the Supreme Chair at Alta and looking across at clouds streaming past Mount Superior.  “Skiing is more like flying than flying is,” he said.  “I’ve always preferred skiing.”  Then he disappeared, sailing smoothly down the steep track between the trees.

I knew exactly what he meant.  Actual flight isn’t what it is in dreams until you’ve actually done it.  And then, of course, it changes.  I still have dreams in which I’m managing difficult landings.  But my uncle’s comments were a surprise, nevertheless.  He flew for much of his life and he loved it.

When I think about flight and what captures the experience at its deepest and most beautiful, two books come to mind Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind Sand and Stars and Charles Lindbergh’s We.  Both are classics, easily found and often read, at least by those with an interest in aviation.  They capture, the novelty, brash-heroism and beauty of the endeavor when it was new.  Saint-Exupéry remains a particularly powerful example of how the exploration of a new physical and scientific frontier can also summon the intellectual best of those who pursued it.  Flight, particularly in a single engine plane,  makes Newtonian physics visceral and philosophical in a way it isn’t ordinarily.

Here’s a simple example.  One day I was flying with my instructor over Antelope Island, practicing emergency landings.  (We weren’t actually landing, just going through the procedures, choosing a landing site and then flying low over it to see how good the selection was.)  We were in one of the school’s  3 Piper Tomahawks, a low-wing trainer with a nice big tail.  My instructor mentioned that they’d originally had 4.  The fourth had been flown in inappropriate conditions as a storm was coming in.  The pilot attempted to return to the airport but the storm’s wind velocity exceeded the maximum airspeed of the Tomahawk.  The little airplane was blown gently backwards into the side of a hill on the island.  The injured pilot survived but a spent the greater part of a miserable night with the wreckage.

When I think of the best books about space flight, a forgotten and neglected classic comes to mind:  A House in Space by Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.  Cooper’s book is a history of Skylab , a set of manned missions in the cesura between the Gemini and Apollo programs utilizing the Gemini capsule technology and a space station improvised from an Atlas booster second stage.  Cooper was one of the first to look at all aspects of space flight and recognized the importance of simulation and engineering.  His wide purview enabled him to identify questions and issues which are at the technological and physical heart of the pursuit of manned flight.  It’s surprisingly pertinent today when robotics is offering a viable alternative for many missions.  And Cooper, through the words of the astronauts, like Saint-Exupéry and Lindbergh before him, gives you a sense of what it’s really like to fly in space, from the explosive creaks and pops of an orbiting spacecraft as it sails through a 400 degree temperature change with every sunrise and sunset every twenty minutes to the relentless astronaut preparation to make flying and dealing with the most knotty and obscure emergencies natural.  It’s a neglected classic worthy of rediscovery.

I think my favorite line in “The Right Stuff” belongs to Sam Shepard portraying Chuck Yeager.  “What’s next, Ridley?”  (Comet Lovejoy by Dr. Robert Jensen).