Is there something distinctly American about small-plane travel?
Certainly, in the practicalities of it, America is aviators’ paradise in that there are many, many more airports here than there are in Europe, for example. The Europeans have all these annoying small villages where they could have nice airports. It’s much easier to fly here—it’s a big spread-out country. And the regulations are more skewed in the pilot’s favor here than they are other places. But I do not believe that the impulse to fly is particularly American at all. Indeed, some of the most passionate aviators are Europeans. On the aviation message boards the Europeans are always lecturing Americans in a tone very much like the play Our Town—saying, “Oh, you don’t realize how good you’ve got it. If you were over here you’d appreciate the paradise you’re living in.” I think it’s a human impulse—but a human impulse that just happens to be easier to indulge in the U.S. than anyplace else. A lot of your book focused on the Klapmeier brothers, and it seemed like there were many parallel
