Volume 31, Number 21 & 22 · January 17, 1985
Love of Flying
By Gore Vidal
The Winged Gospel: America's Romance with Aviation, 1900–1950
by Joseph J. Corn
Oxford University Press, 177 pp., $17.95
I was twice footnote to the history of aviation. On July 7, 1929, still on the sunny side of four years old, I flew in the first commercially scheduled airliner (a Ford trimotor) across the United States, from New York to Los Angeles in forty-eight hours. Aviation was now so safe that even a little child could fly in comfort. I remember only two things about the flight: the lurid flames from the exhaust through the window; then a sudden loss of altitude over Los Angeles, during which my eardrums burst. Always the trouper, I was later posed, smiling, for the rotogravure sections of the newspapers, blood trickling from tiny lobes. Among my supporting cast that day were my father, the assistant general manager of the company (Transcontinental Air Transport), his great and good friend, as the never great, never good Time magazine would say, Amelia Earhart, as well as Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose husband Charles was my pilot. [1] Both Lindbergh and Amelia had been hired by the line's promoter, one C.M. Keys (not even a footnote now but then known as the czar of aviation), to publicize TAT, popularly known as 'The Lindbergh Line.'
Review, 7610 words
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