Mariana Gosnell's tribute to grass-roots flying--the story of her Luscombe flight around the country--amounts to a learn-to-fly campaign in hard-cover. Zero 3 Bravo could to for general aviation what the movie Topgun did for naval aviation recruiting.

Her notes--in the shorthand she learned in school because she wanted a secret language--sat untouched long after her 1977 flight while she continued her career at Newsweek. After quitting the magazine to finish the book, she spent two years finding the "voice" in which she wanted to write. An eloquent voice it is, sensible, as Garrison Keillor notes in a review, and unpretentious.

Gosnell is no techie, thank goodness, becoming one of the last in her newsroom to toss away the typewriter in favor of a computer. Describing her 1950 Luscombe Silvaire as having a face that is "sweet, comic, adenoidal," she concentrates on the things she enjoys most about flying--the freedom, the solitude in the air, and "chummy little airports" on the ground. Open her book at any point, and you're more likely to find her exploring aviation society than power settings.

The airplane is her equivalent of a vacation cabin in the woods, but as she notes, her favorite retreat moves. The flight was actually made to escape the suffocation of New York City. She is still there, and the Luscombe is still her pressure relief valve.

The book offers pilots a chance to compare aviation in the 1970s with that of today.

The 950-hour private pilot has no desire to upgrade to a more complex, faster machine. She only reluctantly bought a radio with more channels and a transponder. However, she is beginning to think about a portable GPS receiver.

Her next book is about ice, all kinds of ice--ice on runways, Arctic ice, ice on aircraft, even iced tea. "I try to slip aviation in wherever I can," she said. If Gosnell on Ice is a good as Gosnell in the air, she is an author to watch.

Zero 3 Bravo, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, is available in bookstores for $25. --Alton K. Marsh

From the Publisher

With all the exhilaration that comes from being up in the sky alone, with the warmth that comes from being on the ground with the people at small airports, Mariana Gosnell tells the story of her three-month adventure in her single-engine tailwheel airplane, Zero Three Bravo.

The adventure began on a hot summer day when "the city seemed particularly punishing to body and spirit." Enticed by the ribbon of sky that she could see from her office window high above Manhattan, she decided to fly her small plane solo across the country and back.

Taking a leave from her job, and packing all the clothes, charts, and emergency equipment that she could squeeze into her Luscombe Silvaire (a Model 8F built in 1950, with two seats, high wings, and a 95-horsepower engine), she sets out to fly from one small airport to another around the United States. We're with her in the cockpit, sharing the excitements, sights, and even the techniques of flying, as she cruises low, navigating almost solely by landmarks, maneuvering through rain and winds, and always delighting in the ever-changing panorama below. From her home airport in Spring Valley, New York, she heads south to North Carolina and Georgia, west across Texas to Los Angeles and San Francisco, and back again over the Rockies and the plains and farms of the Midwest.

Along the way with her, we meet the dreamers, tinkerers, escapists, loners, and ordinary folk who fly small planes for pleasure and for a living. They are cropdusters, fishspotters, Sunday pilots, banner towers, and the many others who are still attracted to the challenge of gypsying around the skies in a tiny craft.

And we come to know the men and women who run or hang out around small airports - a friendly fraternity of those who share a love of flying machines and a beckoning sky. Usually there's a big welcome in the little office, a few stories to be swapped, information given and received, hospitality tendered (a meal, a ride to town, a bed for the night) - and often a friendship begun.

Filled with the romance of flight - what it is that makes a person want to roam 1000 feet above the earth - Zero Three Bravo is armchair travel that soars. It is a song of praise to flying, and to an alluring and all too rapidly disappearing part of our heritage.

Mariana Gosnell was born and grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University. She worked for many years at Newsweek magazine, where she reported on medicine and science. She lives now in New York City and is working on her second book.

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