How to Fly

I fell in love with Amy Johnson when I was fourteen. I had more or less given up on the idea of flying; now, what interested me was the possibility, not of defying gravity and floating away into space, but of disappearing altogether. I still had dreams where I glided downstairs, or along an empty street, my feet just millimetres above the ground, but, more often, I saw myself from outside, walking in new snow, or in brilliant sunshine, and vanishing — gradually, one step at a time — into thin air. It seemed an obvious progression: after flying came the disappearing act and so many of the great aviators had done it. Saint-Exupéry, for example, had simply melted into the upper atmosphere, the author of my favourite book — Wind, Sand and Stars — becoming the very elements he most loved. I could never quite believe that any of the great aviators had crashed: I couldn’t see them spiralling into the ocean, to drift for a few hours or days waiting vainly to be rescued, while the sharks circled and closed in; I couldn’t see them consumed by fire, or cut to pieces; I could only imagine them as lost. Which is to say: I could only imagine them in some blessed, deeply sensual state, one degree from angelhood, the air bright and sharp on their faces and in their lungs, as they slipped through some invisible barrier that only the lost can detect. By the time I was fourteen, this was what I admired and longed for: to disappear, to be lost, to arrive at an unimaginable elsewhere. Why would I want to fly, if I could vanish? To become a Saint-Exupéry, or an Amelia Earhart, had less to do with aeronautics than with invisibility.

The most invisible aviator of all was Amy Johnson. Her story is not unique in the annals of flight, but it is perhaps the most austere, and almost certainly the most beautiful. She is best known for her solo fight, in May 1930, from Croydon to Darwin, Australia, a passage of 11,000 miles, which she completed in nineteen days in a single-engine Gypsy Moth. The following year, with co-pilot Jack Humphreys, she flew from England to Japan; in 1932, flying solo again, she set the England to Capetown record. Throughout the Thirties, she pursued non-stop flights to the United States and India, with her husband, Jim Mollison. When war broke out, she joined the Air Transport Auxiliary, where her duties were fairly routine—and it was on one of these ordinary flights, rather than above some faraway ocean, that she disappeared, crashing into the Thames estuary on January 5, 1941. She was the first ATA pilot to be killed: it seems she parachuted out of her stricken craft, but drowned in the icy water, silent and unseen.

Amy Johnson was the first real infatuation of my life, but I wasn’t very much interested in her biography. What I cared about were her solo flights. It was only by flying solo that an aviator could reach the borderline between this world and the invisible, and it was only by being lost that she could cross. that line, falling out of the sky and into forever, alone, blessèd, untouchable. That was what disqualified Amelia Earhart from flight’s highest echelon: she did make solo voyages, and she did disappear, during an attempt, in 1937, to be the first woman to fly around the world — but she was not alone. Her navigator, Fred Noonan, was in the aircraft with her when she went down, and presumably perished with her, somewhere near Howland Island, in the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes I dream of her solo Atlantic flight, between Harbor Grace in Canada and the north Irish coast, (she had been heading for Paris, but severe weather conditions forced her to land near Derry), and I honour her as one of the great flyers, but, like so many others, she can only be numbered among the missing, not ranked with those who truly disappeared. To disappear, you had to be alone. That, for me, was the fundamental rule of flying.