"Ask the Pilot"

[fiefoe]

Two things tethered me to the book beyond my lukewarm interest in the subject ('Should pilots carry firearms in the cockpit?') dictated. One is the Q&A format, which induced the what's-beyond-this-mountain syndrome in me, (the last one was "The Explainer"); the other is Smith's lucid, jaunty writing.

There is more than a little touch of the poetic in our pilot:

• It is, at once, the most richly promising and bottomlessly lonely image. All the potential of flight encapsulated in that shutter snap; yet we see, at heart, two eager brothers in a seemingly empty world... We see centuries' worth of imagination brought to a bleak, almost completely anonymous fruition. Which is probably how it works-how it has to work-with many of history's more pivotal moments.
• The (JFK Airport's TWA terminal) lobby is a fluid, unified sculpture of a space, futuristic yet firmly organic. It's a kind of Gaudi inversion, a sand-colored, carved-out atrium reminiscent of the caves of Turkish Cappadocia, overhung by a pair of cantilevered ceilings that rise from a central spine like huge wings.
• Which (the NW logo) lone wouldn't be terrible, if only it weren't such a devolved incarnation of the mark it usurps. ... Tragic, ruinous, austere.
  
• There was something demonstrably civilized about the fully spelled "United Airlines" on the side of every plane, now snipped of its overtones to a lackadaisical "United."
  
• Continental's logo... would almost be handsome if it weren't so immaculately inoffensive.