Our Views: When pilots were stars
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Pick up a newspaper story about air travel these days, and you’re likely to confront grim news about airline mergers, traffic delays and the other routine headaches that seem to define air travel in the 21st century.
So we were naturally heartened to turn a recent page of The New York Times and find an article about air travel that evoked a headier, more romantic era. The story concerned recent efforts to decipher the mystery of just what happened to legendary French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who disappeared off the coast of France in 1944 during a mission against the Nazis.
Saint-Exupéry belonged to a pioneering group of celebrity pilots who came of age in the 1920s and 1930s — a group that also included Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart and Beryl Markham. They flew when aviation was in its dangerous infancy, and the books they wrote about their experiences were read by thousands.
As historian David McCullough pointed out in a book called “Brave Companions,” these celebrity pilots knew “The pioneering age they were part of was certain to be short-lived, that with the steady advance of aircraft and instruments, their kind of flying would soon by a thing of the past.”
In 1933, Lindbergh predicted that air travel would soon become so routine that books about his flights would be period oddities.
He was right, of course, but not before a war claimed the life of his friend and fellow pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
So we were naturally heartened to turn a recent page of The New York Times and find an article about air travel that evoked a headier, more romantic era. The story concerned recent efforts to decipher the mystery of just what happened to legendary French pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who disappeared off the coast of France in 1944 during a mission against the Nazis.
Saint-Exupéry belonged to a pioneering group of celebrity pilots who came of age in the 1920s and 1930s — a group that also included Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart and Beryl Markham. They flew when aviation was in its dangerous infancy, and the books they wrote about their experiences were read by thousands.
As historian David McCullough pointed out in a book called “Brave Companions,” these celebrity pilots knew “The pioneering age they were part of was certain to be short-lived, that with the steady advance of aircraft and instruments, their kind of flying would soon by a thing of the past.”
In 1933, Lindbergh predicted that air travel would soon become so routine that books about his flights would be period oddities.
He was right, of course, but not before a war claimed the life of his friend and fellow pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
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