The Plane | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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More about the P-38 Lightning | Plane Discovery article | PBS Documentary | | | | | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Meet the Author | Return | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
from The Little Prince, translated by Katherine Woods |
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So then I chose another profession, and learned to pilot aeroplanes. I have flown a little over all parts of the world; and it is true that geography has been very useful to me. At a glance I can distinguish China from Arizona. If one gets lost in the night, such knowledge is valuable. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry answered the siren call of aviation early on, flying for the first time at the age of 12 in a Berthaud-Wroblewski during a flight demonstration at Ambérieu (6.) | So I lived my life alone, without anyone that I could really talk to, until I had an accident with my plane in the Desert of Sahara, six years ago. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
In his prime, as a pilot for the Latécoère line in the late 1920's, he manned the open cockpit of the 300-horsepower Breguet 14, the mail plane of the day. The year 1930 witnessed the advent of the Latécoère 25 and 26 to replace their less sophisticated predecessor (6.) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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"What is that object?" "That is not an object. It flies. It is an aeroplane. It is my aeroplane." And I was proud to have him learn that I could fly. |
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When France succumbed to German invasion during the Second World War, Saint-Exupéry answered another call, this time the cry of his ravaged country. He pleaded his way into the Allied Forces where he was allowed to pilot the modern P-38 Lockheed Lightning for reconnaissance missions even though his age and prior injuries should have kept him grounded. By the time those around him finally decided to expose Saint-Exupéry to secret information which would prevent him from being able to fly on the first of August, 1944, he had embarked the day before on a reconnaissance mission from which he would never return (6.) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Many of those who met him considered Saint-Exupéry something of a dreamer, including the well-known French psychoanalyst Madame Pierre Jean-Jouve, who attributed his love of flying to a form of escapism (6.) Maxwell Smith notes that some of Saint-Exupéry's charm lies in that "in some ways he never grew up but always kept this feeling of wonder, of eager anticipation, in which the real world and the imaginary one blend" (5.) Saint-Exupéry's own outlook on aviation and the constraints of reality amounts to an idea he once summed up for a friend: "I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things; it gives me a sense of wider horizons" (6.) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
"So you, too, come from the sky! Which is your planet?" | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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