The scheme of her book is simplicity itself. inventory the landscape from roughly 2,000 feet up, then drop down and describe the people who hang around tiny airports with exotic names such as Possum Kingdom, Neversweat, Idle Hour and Hoodoo. The book is just as much a tour. of eccentric humanity as it is a geographic travelogue. There is the drunk-turned evangelist in Paris, Texas, with a chapel in a hangar, and the man in Gallup, N.M., who lived for 20 years in Alaska and misses seal meat more than anything (“We ate it every damned day”). And there is the couple in Dawson, Ga., who, when asked what people around there eat, say, “Things like guinea, squirrel and robin. ‘Robin!’ I gasped. Well, they said, they never ate robin, but they knew people who did.”
Many of the locales spotted by Gosnell, a former NEWSWEEK reporter, are delightfully bizarre, particularly the residential development outside Phoenix where people can taxi their planes right into their garages, More often, though, she seeks out quieter but no less wonderful sights, such as a small graveyard near Fairhope, Ala. There she found one tombstone with a carving of a ship engraved with the words u.s.s. SAILING HOME. Nearby was the headstone of Robert (Bud) Cochran, inscribed WE HAD LOTS OF FUN, EDNA.
“Zero Three Bravo” is cheerful but never fatuous, perhaps because thoughts o mortality are never far from the author’s mind. Death is a conversational main-stay in the airports Gosnell visits. Innumerable strangers introduce themselves by observing matter-of-factly that they knew someone who died in a plane just like hers. By the end of the book, this opener has become a dourly funny refrain. But the most chilling incident occurs near Lexington, Ky., when Gosnell is showing her plane off to a nonflier who silently stares at her frail vehicle for a long minute and then says, “I think I’d want somebody to die with me.”
Little planes, Gosnell suggests, the simplest, crudest things aloft, have more to do with our initial impulse to soar than the most sophisticated jets: “The sky is bound now with electronic airwaves and bulging with control zones…but the impulse to go up and tool around the sky is the same as it was when planes were all wood, nails and glue and aviators wore riding breeches and boots.” Midway through her journey, at the Grand Canyon, she encounters a fello flier who perfectly captures the atavistic feeling that small-craft pilots have for their planes. “‘The gears are my feet,’ he said, looking downward. ‘The wings’-he held his arms up and out to the sides, waggling his fingers-‘are my fingertips. The nose’-he extended a hand, palm first-‘is my nose’.” Not for nothing does Gosnell name her book after her plane, whose human qualities she dotes on-its “almost human face, sweet, comic and adenoidal.”
For Gosnell, flight is not a metaphor but a state of being, the preferred state. “How great to be up and away, particularly away!” she writes, and she convinces us that it’s true. “Zero Three Bravo” is that rare thing, a literary work of straightforward affection without a trace of sentimentality. It has all the earmarks of an instant classic.
