I have finished The Cannibal Queen, a book indirectly suggested by a reader in a comment on A 48-state tour of the U.S. by light aircraft. Stephen Coonts, a former Navy A-6 Intruder pilot, does a much more ambitious 48-state tour. He flies an open-cockpit Stearman biplane. There is no attitude indicator if he gets into a cloud. There is no GPS or moving map or even a VOR or ADF. It is all sectional charts, looking down at landmarks, and calling ATC for help if lost.
Coonts pretty much admits that he wrote the book because he got a contract to write the book (and because he wanted to deduct the cost of the Stearman and the trip?). The writing seems a little forced and it isn’t clear what the story is.
Coonts describes the U.S. in 1991 as beginning to collapse under the weight of government regulation, e.g., with fuel providers at small airports being forced out of business by EPA requirements to dig up fuel tanks. He writes that a specific individual “is the FBO” at an airport and decries the corporatization of FBOs (airport gas stations) that was then in progress. Coonts doesn’t think that a pilot should be greeted by a young front desk worker with no experience behind the stick or yoke. Today, of course, the FBOs have been rolled up and are mostly owned by foreigners (see BBA Aviation and Jet Aviation, leaders by gallons pumped and headquartered in the UK and Switzerland respectively).
Much of what Coonts writes would offend young Americans today. He assumes that a woman’s appearance and age, rather than her professional achievements and commitment to social justice, will have a big effect on the extent to which men will want to have sex with her. (Coonts describes himself as part of the no-fault divorce generation, and an ex-wife appears in the book?) Disney World 10 years before 9/11: “Here’s the casbah in Tangiers without the dirt and squalor and Moslem fanatics ready to slit your throat!” Coonts ridicules a “a professor of political science at some little college here in New England” for starting a sentence with “As an intellectual…” He doesn’t anticipate that this style of discourse would take over first the liberal arts college and then the nation as a whole:
I like going to classes because I can learn a lot. About the students, I mean. Here the great arias of self-involvement—far more operatic than Puccini’s “O Mio Babbino Caro”—wind their way through the boxy little classrooms as professors eagerly facilitate our growth as social beings and master complainers. I learn how to speak effectively within my new milieu. I master an Oberlin technique called “As a.” “As a woman, I think …” “As a woman of color, I would speculate …” “As a woman of no color, I would conjecture …” “As a hermaphrodite.” “As a bee liberator.” “As a beagle in a former life.” Only what will I say? Whom will I speak for? I raise my hand. “As an immigrant …” Pause. All eyes on me. This isn’t Stuyvesant; here immigrants are a rare, succulent breed, even if the ones present usually have parents who own half of Lahore. “As an immigrant from the former Soviet Union …” So far, so good! Where can I take this? “As an immigrant from a developing country crushed by American imperialism …” As I speak, people, by which I mean girls, are looking at me and nodding. I have shed every last vestige of the Hebrew school nudnik and the Stuyvesant clown. The things I say in class are no longer meant to be funny or satiric or ironic; they’re meant to celebrate my own importance, forged in the crucible of our collective importance. There is no room for funny at Oberlin. Everything we do must move the human race forward.
— from Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure: A Memoir
Beginning pilots who suffer from motion sickness will be pleased to know that Coonts got through his primary training in the U.S. Navy only with the aid of Dramamine.
Tailwheel pilots will be comforted to learn that this former military aviator is never able to land the Stearman consistently. After landing weapons-heavy A-6 planes on aircraft carriers, Coonts is terrified when the wind kicks up to 20 knots and/or is not directly down the runway. One practical tip that Coonts supplies is to give up on wheel landings. He says that it is better to groundloop after a slow three-pointer than to crash after a fast wheel landing: “Scrub off every knot you can before you put her on the ground, then if things go to hell, all you’ll have to worry about is a scraped wingtip and damaged pride.”
What about those awesome Blue Angels pilots in air shows? Coonts describes the one “ex-Angel” he knew as being ineffective in combat. According to Coonts, there was no real role for fighters in Vietnam due to the fact that that the North Vietnamese didn’t present a realistic challenge. So that the fighter pilots wouldn’t have to sit on the sidelines, the U.S. turned fighter planes into bombers with a feeble capacity. The ex-Angel was shot down and killed on the last day of combat in Vietnam. He made multiple passes over the same target to drop 1 out of 6 total bombs at a time. This gave the enemy time to hone its anti-aircraft aiming skills.
The book highlights some big changes in American society since 1991. The author is from northeastern West Virginia and stops there to visit his parents during the trip. This is now the heart of the taxpayer-funded opioid “epidemic,” but there is no suggestion in the book that, just a few years later, a huge percentage of folks in that region will be on SSDI and OxyContin. Coonts visits the Confederate Air Force, a bunch of World War II veterans keeping World War II planes flying. Today the veterans are dead and the group has renamed itself the Commemorative Air Force. Coonts doesn’t foresee the inability of Americans to tolerate anything named “Confederate” nor that the occasional disputes about black Americans’ position in U.S. society would become far more frequent, public, rancorous, and litigated. Coonts also misses the impending gender war. He writes about women as though they are adults, capable of deciding whether to have sex with men (even in a Boulder, Colorado college fraternity party context!), capable of working in any career, etc.
Coonts accurately predicts the statistical decline of American entrepreneurism. He attributes a shift toward big enterprises to the development of a “license Raj” government that would make operating a small business impractical (see Economist and also “Why young people don’t like the Republican tax plan: they are planning to be W-2 wage slaves”).
The author’s political views seem inconsistent. He sees the federal government as essentially incompetent and insanely wasteful (“Uncle Sugar”), partly based on his experience in Vietnam and partly based on observing regulatory trends. But then he admires Franklin D. Roosevelt, the American arguably most responsible for turning the U.S. into a government-directed economy (see some of my postings on The Forgotten Man, e.g., U.S. economy may not be tough enough to survive incompetent government (July 2008, just a few months before the U.S. did collapse!)). He proposes that FDR’s image be chiseled into Mt. Rushmore.
So… if you’re passionate about aviation and wandering around the huge continent that we stole from the Indians, the book is worth the investment.
More: read The Cannibal Queen.