The Greatest Plane

A Researcher, an Impossible Question, and a Flat Spin Into Obsession

New work in progress

“I stood before the big aluminum beast. It was a friendly beast. I loved it already.”

The Greatest Plane was supposed to be just a writer’s-block exercise.

And then I realized that it’s more than a silly and impossible thought experiment. And it might teach me about much more than airplanes.

“I learned about classical music from aviation documentaries. As a kid I’d sit in front of the TV and hear Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, with those startling strings and horns, while swarms of German fighter planes filled the screen, flying over the French countryside, or the English Channel, or the Russian borderlands, or wherever they wanted to go.”