a person could look straight up and never see it, it’s been so high, so free, so unlocked from the world! Nobody else thought such things, I’d bet, except me and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

The stories you can tell, I whispered to the engine cowling, to the rudder. The far places, the storms and rains and winds, the world you’ve seen beyond the fence of my horizons! Tell me, airplane, will I one day learn to fly? Will my love of freedom and control conquer my fear of heights and spins?

Those questions I could ask the Luscombe, but since it would be years before I’d know how to listen to her answers, I heard only silence, the muffled rasp of terry cloth on smoothing mirror.

No one else could I ask. The few aviators I had met were as frosty and unspeaking as they had been in Saint-Exupéry’s day, wrapped in an intimidating cloak of knowledge and flight time. They spoke little, even to each other. Nobody said a word about above the clouds or unlocking from the world. A brief nod, perhaps, on the way to their aircraft, then they’d close themselves in a cockpit, an engine would start in a whirl of wind and fire, and moments later they’d be golden specks dwindling north, disappearing east, vanishing west in sunny haze.

The only pilot who spoke much to me then was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the one who would have sworn he was dead. Home at night, I turned the pages of Airman’s Odyssey, savoring the acquaintance of this man turned intimate instead of intimidating by what he had learned. Better than standing beside him, I stood inside his mind while he watched the weather, studied the routes that he would fly. When this one pilot started his engine and flew over his horizons, he didn’t disappear; he came closer to me.

I was there, unsure and nervous before that first flight with the mails from Toulouse to Alicante, listening to our friend Guillamet: “Think of those who went through it before you, and say to yourself, ‘What they could do, I can do.’” Of course, I nodded, looking up from the page. Of course I can do it! And with that I joined every other person who has become an airplane pilot: I put my fears aside and learned.

I had Saint-Exupéry’s map to follow of what to expect flying might be ... a fairy-tale world of sunlight on an ocean of clouds; of sheep dashing down distant hillsides, attacking airplane wheels; instruments glowing in soft-night cockpits; stars like beacons set afire for pilots to steer by; gazelles unfolded from seaside deserts; monster winds gnashing airplanes like croissants for breakfast. He told me that I wasn’t alone, that it was all right for me to be touched and changed by the glory of flight.

In his day, aviation was a risky job for the none-too-well educated, work for the not-too-thoughtful who fancied early violent death at the controls of large crashable machines. People of reflective mind did not become heavy-equipment drivers in those times, even if the heavy equipment had wings and flew. His books were read with the same startled bafflement as we would have reading a tractor driver’s books today ... what insight and humor and humanity, found on the blade of a bulldozer!

In writing what he saw and learned from aviation, Saint-Exupéry shattered a stereotype. Out of the pieces came a model for something new: the thoughtful airplane pilot, the articulate flyer. Living and writing as he does in these three books of Airman’s Odyssey, he gave permission for others to become more than robots pushing the controls of a machine.

When I was a pilot with an American air force fighter squadron in France, stationed two hundred miles north of Toulouse, 37 years north of 1926, I turned again to the ideas that I had read when I was the kid with airplane polish in his hands.

Sleep blown away by the siren just outside our window, bolted through the dark to airplanes fueled and loaded for war, scrambled into our machines and slammed high-speed through checklists, we were set to start engines and launch into the night. One coded word on the radio from the general and we’d be fired like missiles against our secret targets to the east. Without that word, it wasn’t war, it was just another practice alert. We waited in our dim-glowing cockpits.

France, I thought. I’m here tonight in the homeland of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry! I remembered my old friend and teacher, thought about the way he had chosen to live and die. If I could squeeze his books until just two words remained, I asked myself, what two words would they be? There must be one idea that mattered more....

Affirm Life. It mattered more to him than his own living.

The bombs clung dark as the night to my wings, leeches anxious to suck the life from a city whose crime it was to have been built in the wrong half of Germany. I shook my head, ever so slightly, listened to empty static on the radio. No word yet to launch.

Saint-Ex, I thought, if the code came in your earphones, would you fly to the target and turn midnight to noon, would you cremate living people because some general told you to?

Dark. Moonless starless darkful night.

I don’t know jet planes or computers or nuclear weapons, he said. What I know is that long before you die, Richard, you’ll begin answering to yourself for every life-denying choice you’ve made.

Never once had the air force, for all its fixation on classrooms, taught pilots a course in Individual Responsibility for the Murder of Cities. I needed teaching, fast. In all my training, I had never thought, that’s not the general’s thumb on the bomb release, it’s mine!

Antoine, old friend, can a line pilot, can a first lieutenant waiting ready in the cockpit, can he decide by himself to follow other laws than military? Can I choose a different future than sudden noon for my city, can I choose not to arm the bombs, can I fly low and lay the things down cold in some pasture outside city limits?

A lightning answer. Before you turned fighter pilot, he said, you turned human being.