Airfield - Hardcover

My dad worked at La Guardia Airport when I was growing up, and occasionally he'd take me to see the huge hangars, where great propeller planes shone under bright lights and mechanics worked through the night. I was enthralled by the place, just as I was by the stories my folks told of the 1930s, when Dad first went to work for the airlines and the two of them shifted about from one tiny Texas airport to another. Years later, wishing to learn more about those days, I researched and wrote Airfield.

I spent months talking to people who knew aviation in its adolescence. Poking through libraries, museums, and airline archives, I found tales of pilots landing in farm fields and of stunt fliers carving loops over awestruck audiences. I read of wing-walkers and air racers. I learned of lost and crashed planes and of planes guided to safety by smudge pots, radio beams, and light beacons strung across the land.

Staring into black-and-white photos, I met the radiomen whose equipment let aviation grow up. And again and again, I read the eloquent, groping words of early-day pilots who wanted to describe the enormous sky they'd lost their hearts to. (Copyright c 1999 by Harcourt, Inc. All rights reserved.)

In the early days of aviation, planes are small, flight is dangerous, and an airfield is an exciting place. Sheep--and people--can wander onto the runway. Lights can flicker. Radios can short out in a storm. But hundreds of people will come to watch an air show, to be awed and amazed by the wing-walkers, the stunt fliers, and the precision formations.

That's what it's like at the Muddy Springs Airport. Beatty hangs out there because her uncle manages the field, and she is hoping to see her dad when he flies in--and quickly out again--on the mail run. Moss hangs out there, too, hoping his mechanical skills will be useful enough to earn him the money to survive. They both look forward to a future with planes, and in the air. But they don't foresee the part they will have to play on the ground one night when the field lights fail, the storm is rising, and Beatty's father is flying the plane that's circling, circling, and almost out of fuel.