Flight Patterns: A Century of Stories about Flying Review

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(More customer reviews)This books covers airplanes from a wide variety of angles...inventing, making, flying, working on, etc. Most of the stories seem to consist of creative non-fiction, though there are plenty of fiction stories as well. Some are by the actual flight legends, others are about them. Some are about the passenger experience, others merely take place on planes...or around them. Some never get in the air at all...staying on the ground and looking up.
That said, I can't help but feel a bit disappointed. I ended up skimming a lot of the tales as maybe it's just me, but most of them seemed horribly dry. Some of the historical ones were the worst at this, I fear. Not all will appeal to all audiences either. For instance the one where the boy is fingering the older woman wearing the feminine hygiene pad as they fly in adjacent sets in a jet airliner (sorry, but that is what the story is about).
Anyway, considering the variety of stories, this book is good in some ways, but I would be careful who I recommend it to. For instance, those interested in flight history or airplanes won't like a lot of the stories where planes are merely settings or tangential items. Those who are pilots will possibly think likewise (some might not completely care about a story where the main character is dating a pilot but never goes in the plane?) That's not that much different than a romance, really. For those who like short stories, this may run to boring. For those that like non-fiction or historical, the fictional or personal stories might grate. It's almost precisely because the collection of stories is so broad that while anyone might find one or two stories in here they like, I doubt most people will find themselves liking the whole book...or even most of it unless your tastes are incredibly broad.

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Over the last century air travel has evolved from a high-risk experiment involving a few visionary pioneers to an efficient—and often irritating—means for distributing masses of people to the far reaches of the globe. During the hundred-year history of human air travel, it has yielded writing that is, by turns, heroic, dreamy, subversive, and utterly dire. This anthology traces this trajectory from the early letters and memoirs of Wilbur and Orville Wright, and Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, to the diaries of Amelia Earhart. Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s heroism gives way to the darkly magical storytelling of Roald Dahl, and the spare, elegiac prose of master stylist James Salter. More recent stories by Erica Jong, Mary Gaitskill, Thomas Beller, Mike Albo, Maxine Swann, and David Sedaris examine an array of contemporary subjects, from the addictiveness of mile-high sex, to etiquette for cramped seating and accounts of racial profiling post–9/11. Flight Patterns promises an entertaining refuge for frequent fliers, and a gateway to dreams for nighttime readers. These writings exude the primal fear and cool perspective that can only come from seeing the world—and one’s own life—from a great distance. Flight Patterns renders airplane travel a time capsule of modern life.

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