Free Conquerors of the Sky by Thomas Fleming Page A

could get in a plane and fly thousands of miles away from his mother and never see her again.

HISTORY’S LASH
    â€œYou—you there, young fellow—is that an American accent I hear?”
    Frank Buchanan paused in his effort to tune the motor of a de Havilland Scout, wiped grease from his hands and nodded. The man had the lean face, the spaded beard, the fiery eyes of Mephistopheles in his youth, when his hair was bright red. A flowing gray coat enveloped him almost to his shoetops. He gestured at Frank with an ebony cane. He was surrounded by a half dozen of the most elegant women Frank had ever seen.
    â€œIt sounds like I’m hearing one too,” Frank shouted as his helper got the motor to stop choking and sputtering and emit a racketing roar.

    â€œHailey, Idaho,” the man shouted, holding out his hand. “The name’s Pound. Ezra Pound.”
    â€œThe author of Canzoni ?” Frank said.
    â€œA mechanic who reads poetry!” Pound cried. “You see what I’ve been saying? Americans aren’t a lost cause. There’s hope—if we can get more of them to Europe.”
    They were standing on the grassy airfield at Hendon, a suburb of London, on a sunny Saturday afternoon in May 1914. Every week some two hundred thousand people came out to see the latest planes race around the pyloned course. Britons of all classes had become fascinated by flight. A pilgrimage to Hendon was a must to those who hoped to have any claim to sophistication.
    â€œDo you understand how these things work?” Pound said, leading Frank away from the snarling Rhone rotary engine. “Why one crashes, another stays in the air? The principle behind it?”
    â€œI’ve learned a few things from Geoffrey de Havilland,” Frank said modestly. He could have said much more. He had spent a year in France working for Louis Paulhan, the pilot he had met at the Dominquez Hills air show. Paulhan and other designers were churning out planes in a dozen factories around Paris. He had even accompanied Paulhan to the wind tunnel constructed by Louis Eiffel, builder of the famous tower. In the tunnel French designers studied the effect of airflow on models of the planes they were building.
    In England, a photograph of Rag Time had won him a job in de Havilland’s design department. The big blond Englishman had built one of Britain’s first flyable planes in 1910. He was now working for the Aircraft Manufacturing Company, which operated from an old bus garage in Hendon. Frank had come to England to learn more about the changes the British were making in the airplane’s basic design. De Havilland was working with scientists who had been studying aerodynamic problems in their laboratories. They recommended moving the wings of a plane back to the middle of the fuselage, closer to the center of gravity, enlarging the tail and the ailerons—all aimed at giving the aircraft as much stability in the air as a boat on the water.
    A few minutes’ conversation convinced Pound that his American discovery was the perfect man to introduce his circle of poets and poetry lovers to the mysteries of flight. Pound saw the plane as a prime example of his artistic theories. Since he arrived in England in 1908, he had become a one-man cultural crusade, churning out poetry and critical essays proclaiming that the new century required an entirely new art. He called his theory Vorticism and he publicized it in the pages of a magazine called Blast.
    Vorticists believed art could and should represent reality with the same precision as an equation in fluid dynamics or solid geometry. They wanted to make a poem or story work as precisely as a machine. At the heart of every work of art there was a vortex, a pulsing fist of forces that gave it energy and meaning. It was the critic or the editor’s task to find that vortex and help the writer exploit it to the utmost.
    Within a week, Frank Buchanan found