At one time or another every private pilot dreams about flying a small airplane across the United States from one coast to the other. Some have made the flight and fewer still have written about their adventures. Marianna Gosnell belongs to the latter class of true cross-country pilots and writers. In Zero Three Bravo she writes about flying a Luscombe Silvaire from the East coast to the West and back. Her book is a log of the flight from New York state, down the coast to Florida, through the southwest to California, then back east across the Rockies and the Great Plains. Mixed with the flying are the author's recollections of her life. The narrative moves between descriptions of the earth as seen from a small airplane and stories about the people at small airports and towns. Throughout, Zero Three Bravo manages to avoid the trap that much of travel writing falls into - too many adjectives.
I know of two other books that cover ground similar to Zero Three Bravo: Biplane by Richard Bach and Cannibal Queen by Steven Coonts. Biplane is a lyrical tale of a pilot and an antique 1929 Parks biplane, travelling across the continent in the fashion of the first barnstormers. In contrast, Cannibal Queen, a journal of a flying summer vacation, is an uneven mixture of biplane flying and Holiday Inns, little airports and Disney World. Zero Three Bravo falls somewhere between these two books. It is a story of a pilot and her airplane, but the preoccupation with flying is not obsessive, and there remains room for other people. As a trip diary it is more evocative and it includes unusual places. Instead of the Disney World hotel Marianna Gosnell sleeps under the wing of her Luscombe at the Navajo Trading post in Oljato, Arizona. But perhaps, what sets this book apart from others, is how Ms. Gosnell treats women pilots.
"I don't know if generalizations can be made about female pilots, although people make them. Those who say things to your face may say that women have a more delicate, or sensitive, touch which helps. (...) Then there's the old one about women being better at detail (cross-stiching and all that), and that flying well certainly involves attention to detail. In my own experience the one area where I believe that as a female I came less prepared to fly a plane than an average male, aside from not having all those years of automatic exposure to machinery that boys got when I was growing up, is in planning and thinking ahead while aloft. If I was up flying with my friend Ron, for instance, through some breathtakingly lovely sky and countryside, I'd be much more likely than he to be grooving on the whole scene, paying attention to the current moment and place, while he'd be figuring out the compass heading for a 45-degree entry into the expected pattern at an airport we were planning to land at 50 miles away."
I am not sure that the Gestalt versus the engineering approach to flying can be entirely explained by sex differences. Just as there are men who are big picture thinkers and are not sticklers for details, there are women who thrive in a thicket of technicalities. Perhaps men, conditioned to appear in control, are less likely to admit that they enjoy the view from an airplane, and are more apt to brag about particularly good landing or impeccable navigation.
Throughout the book, Ms. Gosnell describes other women pilots she meets. One, nick-named "Carrot Top", is not only a pilot, but also an A&P mechanic, who travels around the country finding work restoring antique airplanes. Another is the first civilian woman pilot to solo in a T-33 Shooting Star - a military training jet.
While passing though Georgia, Ms. Gosnell meets Laura, a pilot who was the second woman in her county to obtain a license. The author spends a few days with Laura and her family - husband Jim, who designs pig environments for a living, and three children, the oldest one fifteen. Laura took up flying after Jim tried it and gave up, and she even got her own airplane, a Cessna 150. But flying did not make Laura happy. Piloting was not something that southern women did, it wasn't ladylike. Women played bridge, did needlework, cooked, decorated and never worked. The freedom of flying and seeing "...that there was another world..." forever disturbed the balance of Laura's existence. No longer content with house, husband and children, but not confident enough to leave, Laura remained mixed up and unhappy.
One of Ms. Gosnell's more embarrassing flying adventures occurred at the Wall airport near the Black Hills in South Dakota. When she landed a number of the locals were amazed to see a woman Luscombe pilot, especially since Luscombe's have a spirited reputation. When leaving Wall, the author decided to try a different take-off technique to reduce the cross-wind angle; instead of pointing the airplane straight down the runway, she started at one corner and aimed at the opposite far corner of the runway. Distressingly, the result was not as expected - the airplane reached the opposite edge much too soon, nearly hit a runway light and bounced few times in the grass next to the asphalt, before finally taking to the air. The pilot was upset:
"First female in a taildragger at Wall Airport, ha! Two witnesses: Monty and the Bonanza pilot. As I climbed away a terrible sadness washed over me, a staggering sense of loss. I began to weep. I would never get on top of this thing called flying; what I loved to do most I could not do; trying and caring hardly mattered at all."
All pilots have felt like this at one time or another, certainly I have. You can have umpteen hours in all kinds of airplanes, but a gust of wind can still humble you. No one ever gets "on top of this thing called flying", there is always more to learn.
Towards the end of the book the author talks about her dreams of flying. As any pilot, she has dreamt about landing in strange places or taking off under power lines, but her favorite dream is:
"(...) one where I was in my Luscombe high over the plains of East Africa, able to see a great many miles in every direction, and the shadows of clouds were making giant blotches on the ground, like Andy Warhol blossoms, and standing on the blotches as well as in sunny places between them were elephants - hundreds of elephants. My sister was in the passenger seat, looking out with me over this wide world, sharing it with me. It seemed to me then that in this dream were all the elements it took to make a person truly happy."
Perhaps, one of the reasons I enjoyed reading this book is that it is written by someone who loves flying. If flying makes you happy, I think you will like this book.