Deputy editor Jessica Ambats’ recent invitation to readers to write about why flying is important to them reminded me that, decades ago, then-editor Robert Parke invited me to write an essay on that same subject.
Elevated by certain intoxicants, I proceeded to produce a piece of passionate prose so uncharacteristic of these pages that Parke—or perhaps it was our often similarly elevated art director, Bud Loader—decided to present it as white text on black pages. A reader nominated it for the “Excedrin Headache of the Year Award.”
I have always struggled to identify the components, and their relative proportions, in that brew of physical pleasure, philosophical elation, and base self-esteem that bubbles up in me as the wheels leave the ground.
Certainly flying is not always pure pleasure. The humorous description of it as hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror is apt enough, though many pilots don’t even get to experience the enlivening moments of terror except, perhaps, as students. The boredom cannot be denied, but beyond it lies an elusive quintessence that only pilots know.
There is something fundamental about flight that eludes naming, but not feeling.
When Jessica issued her invitation I happened to be reading a volume of the letters of Karen Blixen, a Danish author who wrote in English under the pen name of Isak Dinesen. Blixen’s small body of fictional and not-so-fictional works earned her several nominations for the Nobel Prize in literature, if never the prize itself.
Of her books, the memoir Out of Africa is the one most likely destined for immortality. Nevertheless, a 1985 film version, with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, in spite of, or perhaps because of, its profound distortions of the original, is perhaps better known today than the book itself.
Blixen was 28 when she emigrated in 1913 to what was then British East Africa and is now Kenya. She eventually divorced her dissolute husband, Bror Blixen, who had provided her with, on one hand, the title “baroness” and, on the other, syphilis.
For many years she ran a coffee farm in the Ngong Hills, a little west of Nairobi. The farm, never profitable, was sustained by investments from family members. She became the lover of an extremely magnetic Oxford-educated British aristocrat, Denys Finch Hatton (the Redford role in the film). Finch Hatton, the second son of the sonorous Earl of Winchilsea, made his living—not that he needed to—as a safari guide and “white hunter” for posh clients like the Prince of Wales.
![Karen Blixen’s memoir Out of Africa, published under her pen name of Isak Dinesen, is likely destined for immortality. [Credits: Random House/Karen Blixen Musem]](https://flyingmag1.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/FLY0126_3.1-Technicalities-1.jpeg?width=277)
![Karen Blixen’s memoir Out of Africa, published under her pen name of Isak Dinesen, is likely destined for immortality. [Credits: Random House/Karen Blixen Museum]](https://flyingmag1.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/FLY0126_3.1-Technicalities-2.jpeg?width=357)
In 1929 Finch Hatton bought a de Havilland DH.60G Gipsy Moth in England and had it shipped to Kenya. A biplane of 30-foot span with two seats in tandem, the Gipsy Moth had a 98 hp engine, also called a de Havilland Gipsy, whose four in-line cylinders stuck up into the pilot’s line of sight. The obstacle to visibility was of little consequence, however, since the pilot sat in the aft cockpit and, particularly when landing, couldn’t see anything anyway.
He took Karen flying many times. The experience was for her “the greatest, most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm.” Unable to see Finch Hatton behind her, she was always aware of his presence.
“You could not help feeling that you were like one of the characters of the Arabian Nights, carried through the heavens upon the palms of a djinn,” she wrote. “It is neither the speed nor what one can see that is really the intoxicating thing about flying, but this: that one is moving in three dimensions…Now I can really picture to myself what it must be like to be an angel…I definitely believe that people who think wings are one of the attributes of the blessed are right, or the capacity of moving in three dimensions is a part of bliss…
“Every time I have gone up in an aeroplane and looking down have realized that I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a great new discovery. ‘I see,’ I have thought., ‘This was the idea. And now I understand everything.’’’
Not that the surface of the Earth is not three-dimensional, but its third dimension, that of height, is crushed by gravity. Weight was mankind’s original sin. Wings redeemed it.
In May 1931, after a breakup with Karen, Finch Hatton left Nairobi for Mombasa, stopping at a small settlement called Voi along the way. He had invited Beryl Markham, who was then learning to fly, to go with him. Markham would later solo a Percival Gull across the Atlantic and write a classic memoir, West with the Night. She accepted, but her flight instructor, troubled by a vague premonition—or perhaps some other feeling that later appeared to have been a premonition—urged her to remain behind, and she did.
At Voi, after having a damaged propeller replaced, Finch Hatton invited a friend, who had driven out with her two children to see him off, to go up for a quick flight before he left. She accepted, but one of the children became frightened and frantically begged her not to go, and so she put off the joyride to another time.
Finch Hatton’s Kikuyu assistant Kamau, who had been Karen Blixen’s stable groom, climbed into the front seat, Finch Hatton into the rear. The yellow Moth taxied out, took off, and climbed.
What happened next is wrapped in the mystery created by eyewitnesses who did not understand what they were seeing.
Reportedly the engine stumbled, and the airplane plunged—or perhaps it was the other way around. People ignorant of the ways of airplanes commonly believe that when the engine fails, the airplane plummets. But in reality the airplane glides, unless the pilot does something wrong.
Finch Hatton was the kind of person who does everything well, but Beryl Markham later wrote: “He had taken up flying too recently to be an expert.” The most likely explanation of his crash, it seems to me, is that to avoid landing in the scrub, where the airplane would almost certainly have nosed over, he tried to make the “impossible turn” back to the airstrip, and the Moth stalled and spun.
The area where Blixen’s coffee farm was located is now a suburb of Nairobi called Karen. Finch Hatton, who was 44 when he died, is buried in the Ngong Hills. An obelisk marks his grave, and tourists, many of them no doubt visualizing Robert Redford, visit it.
The coffee farm was sold that year, and Karen Blixen returned to Denmark, where she had said she would never again be able to live. She remained there for the rest of her life. She died in 1962, leaving behind, among other
insights, as persuasive an account as any of why we fly.