Up in the Air

THE FIRESIDE BOOK OF FLYING STORIES (464 pp.)--Edited by Paul Jensen--Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

One day in 1844, a desperately hard-up writer named Edgar Allan Poe submitted a sensational story to the New York Sun. A coal-gas balloon "employing the principle of the Archimedean screw," he said, had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in three days. The gullible Sun splashed this fantasy over its front page; two days later it ruefully apologized.

The Poe hoax--in retrospect, guilty only of being 75 years premature*--leads off this easygoing anthology of flying life and lore. Editor Jensen, a World War II fighter pilot, has rummaged high & low for a collection which should leave flying buffs cooing happily and give even the uninitiated an occasional kick.

Tom Swift & Friends. The best thing about the book is its lack of pretentiousness: Jensen has avoided high-flown speculations about the metaphysics and poetry of flight, has sensibly followed a straight chronological pattern. His opening section mixes solid historical accounts of the infancy of flying with a John Dos Passes dithyramble (from The Big Money) on the Wright brothers, a pleasantly batty story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on an "air jungle" high over Britain, and a tale about Tom Swift taking" his girl up, which opens with the classic line: "Oh, Tom, is it really safe?"

The second and best part, "The Gentlemen Killers," focuses on World War I. "For a short time," writes Jensen, "a rather warped form of chivalry existed which made it poor form to fire on an opponent whose guns or engine were not functioning properly." The German ace, Ernst Udet, remembers how his French peer, Georges Guynemer, refused to fire when Udet's guns jammed. And Floyd Gibbons vibrates excitedly over the death of the greatest German ace of World War I, Baron Manfred von Richthofen.

Combat & Psychology. After the war came an era of reckless barnstorming and adventuring. Editor Jensen has unaccountably omitted the most vivid snapshot of that era, William Faulkner's Death Drag. But he has snagged some other good things: Anne Lindbergh reminisces about a weird Alaskan flight; Antoine de Saint-Exupery describes a Patagonian cyclone; and James Thurber, in his wonderful story, The Greatest Man in the World, draws a satiric profile of Pal Smurch, the cocky little urchin who flew nonstop around the world--the adulation went to his head so badly that he had to be pushed out the window.

Somewhat surprisingly, the stories about World War II flying make dull reading, perhaps because aerial combat had become so formalized that one account seems pretty much like another. But Editor Jensen has dug up two first-rate items for his closing sections. Someone Like You is a poignant sketch of battle fear by Roald Dahl, a onetime R.A.F. pilot. And in The Three Secrets of Flight, Wolfgang Langewiesche, a onetime test-pilot, offers a superbly lucid discussion of the psychological adjustments men must make to survive in the air.

* The first airship crossing of the Atlantic came in 1919 when the British R34 (using hydrogen instead of coal gas) took 4 1/2 days to fly from the Firth of Forth to Mineola, Long Island.

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