Once upon a time, the campfire story goes, when aviation was young and fliers were adventurers on the edge, pilots wanting to make a living in this new field couldn’t just sit around and wait for passengers and students to find them. They had to go to where the people were. And so they got in their Jennys, and their Travel Airs, and their Eaglerocks, and they headed out across America, landing in farmers’ fields and bringing aviation to the masses.
It’s a tale told of a lost time gone by, like sailing on the Spanish Main. Today, the general wisdom would be that the barnstormers have long since flown west. Pilots can’t just drop out of the sky and hop rides out of a field owned by an unknown farmer. The liability alone would be prohibitive. And the population, jaded by years of airline travel and jet noise, would not welcome a pilot who just landed in their alfalfa with open arms.
