“The drama of flight does not take place between the pilot and the environment, but between the airplane and the pilot, and between the pilot and himself.”
David Mamet, Flying magazine Feb 2019.
For the first time in years I’m excited forFlying magazine! Mamet has a Pulitzer Prize, Tony nominations, a parody Twitter account, flies his own plane. And now is a columnist for Flying. In his first column he argues that the best aviation writing is found not in books, but in magazines. Writing by pilots for pilots. I think he may be right. My garage has boxes of old aviation magazines, and there are articles there by Richard Bach, Ernie Gann, Len Morgan, Gordon Baxter, Peter Garrison, on and on, that are timeless.
Mamet wrote Glengarry Glen Ross, which didn’t have a lot to do with flying. But he also wrote the 1997 movie The Edge. In that movie, the character Charles Morse (played by Anthony Hopkins) says:
Just read his article and have read his books on writing. The article was exceptional but I expected that.