Zero Three Bravo: Solo Across America in a Small Plane

With all the exhilaration that comes from being up in the sky alone, with the warmth that comes from being on the ground with the people at small airports, Mariana Gosnell tells the story of her three-month adventure in her single-engine tailwheel airplane, Zero Three Bravo. The adventure began on a hot summer day when "the city seemed particularly punishing to body and spirit." Enticed by the ribbon of sky that she could see from her office window high above Manhattan, she decided to fly her small plane solo across the country and back.

Taking a leave from her job, and packing all the clothes, charts, and emergency equipment that she could squeeze into her Luscombe Silvaire (a Model 8F built in 1950, with two seats, high wings, and a 95-horsepower engine), she sets out to fly from one small airport to another around the United States. We're with her in the cockpit, sharing the excitements, sights, and even the techniques of flying, as she cruises low, navigating almost solely by landmarks, maneuvering through rain and winds, and always delighting in the ever-changing panorama below. From her home airport in Spring Valley, New York, she heads south to North Carolina and Georgia, west across Texas to Los Angeles and San Francisco, and back again over the Rockies and the plains and farms of the Midwest.

Along the way with her, we meet the dreamers, tinkerers, escapists, loners, and ordinary folk who fly small planes for pleasure and for a living. They are cropdusters, fishspotters, Sunday pilots, banner towers, and the many others who are still attracted to the challenge of gypsying around the skies in a tiny craft. And we come to know the men and women who run or hang out around small airports - a friendly fraternity of those who share a love of flying machines and a beckoning sky. Usually there's a big welcome in the little office, a few stories to be swapped, information given and received, hospitality tendered (a meal, a ride to town, a bed for the night) - and often a friendship begun. Filled with the romance of flight - what it is that makes a person want to roam 1000 feet above the earth - Zero Three Bravo is armchair travel that soars. It is a song of praise to flying, and to an alluring and all too rapidly disappearing part of our heritage.