I have before me a bound volume containing a year’s worth of Flying, a gift from an old friend and collaborator, pilot and photographer Baron Wolman, who picked it up at a swap meet for $4. The year, 1916, will surprise anyone who knows that our esteemed publication first appeared, under the name of Popular Aviation, in 1927, the year of Lindbergh’s Atlantic flight. But what I have here is a different Flying, launched in 1914 by the Flying Association of New York City “to gather and present, for the information of the American people, an accurate monthly summary of the progress of aeronautics throughout the world.” Its cover price was 25 cents.
The format was by turns newsy — contests, noteworthy flights, speeches, trophies and medals, dedications of airfields, allocations of funds and events in Europe, where the Great War was raging — and editorial, with articles and essays, some of prodigious length, on various matters, full of aviation boosterism, many of them heavy-breathing polemics on the shortsightedness of the penny-pinching War Department and the need for the United States to invest more in airplanes and pilot training. Some of the headlines are quaint beyond belief: “Junior Anti-Suffrage League Raises $800 for Training Aviators.” Looking forward and backward at the same time, this Janus-face association wanted men to fly, but did not want women to vote. Bloviation knew no bounds: One advertisement for a flying school proclaims, “The Aviator — the Superman of Now. The world has its eyes on the flying man. Flying is the greatest sport of red-blooded, virile manhood.” They must have been thinking of Nietzsche’s Übermensch — the Man of Steel came into being only in 1932.
