The Flying Wire

The first time I saw Edwards Park’s book, Nanette; Her Pilot’s Love Story, I thought, Ho hum, another WW-II fighter pilot’s memoirs. Another collection of scenes like, “Ah saw ‘im comin’ up, so Ah pulled hard left, rolled inta his six, an’ gave him a burst from mah quad 50s!” As a pilot, I’ve grown suspicious of that sort of thing. Did real people actually think that way? All the time? With never a moment of doubt or uncertainty? And were all they so finely focused on the technical details of combat aviation that they never once played around with their aircraft, or glanced at the world outside the cockpit and thought, ”Hey, this is pretty cool!”

Then I took a closer look at the cover of Mister Park’s book and thought, Huh? That’s a P-39? Those were arguably one of the worst planes in history! And the author used the word ‘love’ right here in the title. I had to check this out! Opening to beginning of the first chapter, I read

”Nanette was an airplane. That should be made clear right at the start. She was not a very good plane; actually she stank. But she did a lot for me, I realize, as I look back on her.”

You don’t find treasures like this every day!

Edwards Park writes about the transition of a fairly ordinary man into… a fairly ordinary man who just happened to find himself flying a high performance single-seat combat aircraft in the Pacific Theatre during the early years WW-II. Rather than attempt to impress non-pilots and civilians with his coolness, bravado, and competence, he writes about his actual reactions to what, for a fairly ordinary man, must have been a far from ordinary experience. One of my favorite examples is Park’s description of his first air combat.

“There was a sudden strange sound, a tinny rattling like a barrel of hail on a metal roof. Puzzled, I scanned my instrument panel and saw every engine gauge in the green. I looked out at my wing and then looked again. Something odd there. The smooth contour of my right wing was broken by a sort of cratering effect. What the devil could that be?”

“It was suddenly quite clear what it could be. Bullet holes, that’s what. Those low-life bastards in that bomber had been shooting a machine gun at me, for Christ’s sake! What a savage dangerous thing for them to do!…”

I won’t say more lest I spoil the book for the rest of you. But I urge anyone who’s looking for a superb aviation story — a tale of the Real Stuff rather than the Right Stuff — to check out Nanette, by Edwards Park.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 13th, 2010 at 10:11 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.