Mariana Gosnell takes the reader along on her extraordinary voyage across the U.S. in her single-engine Luscombe Silvaire, Zero Three Bravo. Enticed by the ribbon of sky that she could see from her Manhattan office window, she took a leave of absence from her job and made a three-month solo flight, navigating by use of landmarks and landing in America's little-known, back-country airports. She traveled south from her home airport of Spring Valley, New York, down to North Carolina and Georgia, west across Texas to Los Angeles and north to San Francisco, and then east over the Rockies, the plains, and the farms of the Midwest until she was back home.
What results is a lyrical description of land, sky, and water interwoven with experiences among small-town folks, maverick crop-dusters, banner towers, mechanics, and airport loiterers. With each landing there is a story to be told: the deaf-mute pilot who grounded himself until the eggs in the bird's nest lodged in his plane's engine had hatched, the woman running an airport by herself after losing both her husband and son to flying accidents, and the pilots and "hangar bums" who tried to hide their surprise when they saw a woman pilot flying cross-country solo.

I loved Zero Three Bravo right from the start. I tried to read it slowly, knowing that I would be sad when it ended. 03B is all about the author's trip, in the 1970s, in her Luscombe airplane across the US, stopping almost exclusively at small, non-towered airports. The author is somewhat of a hero to me now, because that is very similar to a goal of mine once I get my license and an airplane of my own. We've actually both flown in and out of SAF airport, the only towered airport on her long trip. This book was recommended to me by a flight instructor who knew that I was interested in traveling all over the place once I'm able. I'm so glad that he suggested it.

Mariana captures the essence of all aspects of her trip. The airports, good and bad landings, weather, other pilots, FBOs, sleeping under her airplane's wings, food, wildlife, being a woman pilot, etc. It was definitely a different time then, and many of the interesting people she met were already relics over 30 years ago. So this isn't necessarily a trip that any of us could recapture these days. But still, you get a flavor of general aviation, small towns, and life back then.

I highly recommend this book to anybody interested in general aviation, whether you're a pilot, interested in becoming a pilot, or just interested in looking through a window to the small towns of the past. ( )

Sort of a Blue Highways of the Sky. Gosnell has a passion for flying, especially in small, single engine planes into uncontrolled airports. She describes the myriad of interesting characters she meets along the way, each with a unique story to tell, and she retells them well.

She learned to fly in Africa where she and a friend had gone for several months. Since the only way to get around is by small plane, she was once flown from hither to yon in a small Cessna and a young woman pilot. Together they swooped down low over herds of elephants and other wildlife and scenery. Gosnell was enthralled and vowed to learn how to fly.

Back in the states, she continued her lessons and purchased an old Luscombe, a very serviceable, if antique tail-dragger. (She discusses at length the advantages and disadvantages of the "conventional" v tricycle type landing gear.)

Her stories reminded me of flights with my uncle when I was barely 10 (This was in the late fifties). He was in the Civil Air Patrol (which I also later joined as a radio officer -- but that's another story) and took me up in his Super Cub, many of which are still around.) Fun.

She beautifully captures the pathos, loneliness, and eccentricities of the people who man the small, often deserted, little airstrips around the country and the yearning many of them feel for the outside world. Particularly poignant was Laura, a thirty-five-year-old mother of Dawson, Georgia, who had learned to fly on a whim and now wanted nothing more to escape the parochialism of the small town where the goals and aspirations for women were pre-determined a century before. Ridiculed and shunned by the community for daring to do something women just don't do (fly a plane), she latched on to Gosnell as a symbol of freedom she didn't have the courage enough to embrace, but which Gosnell (perhaps because she was a cosmopolitan New Yorker) had adopted.

Loved this book. ( )

Gosnell was working at Newsweek as the medicine and science reporter in 1977 when she took three months leave to travel around and take the notes that eventually became this book. Her Luscombe Silvaire 8F, N803B, she kept at Spring Valley Airport near New York City and her midtown Manhattan office.
She flies to Washington, then officially begins her trip with a visit to a grass-strip airfield at Reheboth Beach, where she muses about Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy after hearing about a collision at the airport several years earlier. At Ocean City she meets two young banner tow pilots and watches them picking up banners from the beach with hooks on their planes.
Gosnell learned to fly in Africa, in Nairobi, in a Cessna 150 (a plane she disses as a tricycle rip-off of the Luscombe). She soloed there, and finished her training at Spring Valley.
She talks about flying down the coast, avoiding restricted areas, buzzing the beach, flying down to Johns Island and then inland from Beaufort (BOW-fort), North Carolina past Beaufort (BYEW-furt), South Carolina, to Claxton, Vidalia, and Plains, Georgia. She discusses the choosing of checkpoints—the Sound as she leaves the coast, an airport, an Interstate Highway, a river where it forks.
When she hears others describe their planes in personal terms, she writes, “I didn’t think of my plane as a boy or girl . . . but rather as a pet, like a dog, whose gender doesn’t particularly matter, a friendly, reliable animal pal.”
She considers what it means to be a female pilot, and she listens carefully to the mechanic Carrot Top at Plains and to the Town and Country woman pilot who tells her of her desperation, also at Plains.
She flies to Marianna, then to Fairhope on the Gulf Coast. Because of weather she is unable to fly into Cajun country near New Orleans. She flies to Scott airport near Tallulah and encounters a woman who’s been flying her first solo cross-country and has gotten lost. She also encounters spray pilots—but never female spray pilots.
Gosnell points out the “chain line,” a indeterminate boundary one finds when going from east to west where tie-down ropes are replaced by chains. She flies into Arkansas and then into Texas, stopping at Paris, where she gets a ride in a T-33. The man who gives her the ride keeps saying, “she hasn’t had that much fun since high school!” but Gosnell keeps thinking she didn’t take full advantage of what the plane could do when she had the controls.
She is rained in in Oklahoma City, visiting two friends; then she flies to Altus (Municipal, not AFB) to meet her friend Erik, an Air Force pilot who also owns a Luscombe, and they fly in formation low over the AFB and then on to Lubbock, from which she flies on to Carlsbad Caverns. There a cave specialist friend takes her underground to nonpublic parts of the cave. She flies past El Capitan to El Paso.
She flies over Truth or Consequences and on to Santa Fe, where she misses flying during a five-day visit and car trip with a friend. In Gallup, there’s a Marine “Super Jolly Green Giant” helicopter and a truckers’ restaurant. She gets rained in and talks to an FSS briefer about his adventures in Alaska.
She flies quickly through Canyon de Chelly and then through Monument Valley, lading at a Navajo trading post, Oljato, where she has to wait all day for gas. On the way to Lake Powell, over the rough country below, she comments once again about the combination of dread and desire that she feels as a pilot. She lands at Wahweap, then Page, then flies over the Grand Canyon and on to Cottonwood, where she lets some zealous mechanics do some small repairs on her plane. It is a sometimes confusing feature of her trip description that she often talks about a previous visit to a place, and we don’t always know which visit we are hearing about.
She stops at Stellar Airpark, a fly-in community, and then goes on to Casa Grande where the woman behind the bar in the restaurant tells her a sad story about losing both her husband and her son in two separate mid-air collisions. Gosnell doesn’t much like Tucson, though she says the animals she saw at the Desert Museum give her a sense, as she flies on toward Blythe, that the land she sees from the air is not desolate but alive.
Over the Salton Sea and into the Mojave Desert, to El Mirage with its glider pilots, Santa Paula, with its cheap tie downs and hangar fees. She notes the cross-country effort of Calbraith Rodgers in the Vin Fizz—this was written before Henry Kisor’s flight in Gin Fizz—as she makes her last leg toward the sea and lands at Santa Monica. She thinks back over other country crossings and how no one has gotten very far under his own power—this is the somewhat awkward transition to her visit to the San Joaquin Valley airport of Shafter, where she witnesses the Gossamer Condor’s winning of the Kremer prize for a man-powered flight over a ten-foot obstacle, making two 180-degree turns, one clockwise and one counterclockwise around pylons a half mile apart, and finally over another 10-foot obstacle, in winds not exceeding 11.5 mph over fairly level ground.
Gosnell visits friends in San Francisco before flying to Lake Tahoe, her first taste of mountain flying. She watches preparations for the Reno air races, goes to a horse show in Elko, checks out a cattle ranch that used to belong to Bing Crosby, sees Whooping Cranes flying below her, and muses about the dangers birds pose to pilots and vice versa.
She encounters skydivers in Mountain Home and visits Hemingway’s grave when she flies into Friedman, near Ketchum, Idaho. Earlier, she had been reading Sparky Imeson’s Mountain Flying for some tips; she flies into Jackson Hole and meets him at the only mountain-flying school approved by the FAA.
The Luscombe, says a man in Lander, Wyoming, while refueling 03B, is “the perfect vagabond airplane.” In Thermopolis she swims in a trailer park hot spring pool. She flies on to Black Hills airport, not noticing Devil’s Tower on the way. There she hears again the refrain, “general aviation’s not a money-maker,” and there, with a horse grazing outside the office where she slept, she thinks about the many animals and birds and insects at airports in hangars, on airplanes, on runways. . . .
At Wall, a traumatized young boy, a lot of dead animals, and a botched takeoff make her very sad. She experiences the wind of the Great Plains on her way to Omaha, and flies on to meet cousins in Kansas City. From Creve Coeur airport in St. Louis (pronounced to rhyme with “leave more”), she flies to Lexington and talks to a trainer at Keeneland. From Lexington, she flies to Auxier in eastern Kentucky, where she remembers visiting her grandparents. Her mother and her sister’s family still live in Columbus, where Gosnell was born, and she stays there for a few days and has the annual done on her Luscombe. From there she flies over Murray City, a later home of her grandparents, into West Virginia, stopping overnight at Luray and visiting Luray Caverns; despite fighting claustrophobia in the depths of Carlsbad, she seems to have an affinity for caves. Her last refueling stop before Spring Valley is Wings, not far from where her Luscombe was built. She flies up the Hudson River corridor and up to the airport and the parking spot where she began. ( )