Elizabeth Wein, author of YA historical fiction and nonfiction, spent June 1 attending the International Thriller Writers’ awards ceremony in New York. Her murder mystery Stateless, about international teen aviators competing in an air race across politically riven 1937 Europe, took home the ITW’s top prize in the YA category. Little did the audience know that Wein had spent the previous month pursuing her own airborne thrills. The author had just flown from California to Georgia and back in a rented single-engine plane with her husband, Tim Gatland—then caught a commercial flight to New York.
Wein, originally from Pennsylvania, now lives in Scotland, where she and Gatland share a passion for flight. Their early dates included “flying across Kenya together in a small plane,” she said. Wein earned her pilot’s license in 2003 thanks to her second book, A Coalition of Lions—“I used the advance to take flying lessons”—and her fiction soon followed her upward direction. “I was writing this Arthurian historical series and I kept sticking in all these little flying puns,” she said. After experimenting with short stories about flying aces, she wrote Code Name Verity (2012), a historical thriller featuring a young pilot and a secret agent, and charted her course toward tales of early aviation.
PW caught up with Wein on May 24, as the author was wrapping up her coast-to-coast adventure in a Piper Warrior plane known as One Bravo Juliet, or “Julie” for short. Wein and Gatland had stopped over in Deming, N.M., which Wein called “the only place between El Paso and Tucson where we were able to land kind of suddenly” due to “the amount of lift and turbulence we were getting over the desert. There were dust devils everywhere and we were like, OK, time to get on the ground.”
Wein and Gatland rented the plane from a flight school in Corona, Calif., and discovered it to be “a worn-out, well used aircraft. The engine is not 40 years old, but the airframe is.” Wein also said the basic instrumentation—its altimeter, air speed indicator, and compass—was similar to the planes that her 1930s characters fly. “It has an air-cooled engine, 160 horsepower,” Wein said. “The people in the ’30s would have been flying something closer to 50 or 60 horsepower.” The primary difference is better technology, including radio communication and navigation aids, she said. Even so, she and Gatland planned a cautious route.
“We realized that the aircraft itself was not powerful enough to cross the very high mountains,” Wein said. “It couldn’t actually push itself much higher than about 11,000 feet, and anyway, over that you need oxygen. We had to come as far south as possible” to avoid higher elevations, and that meant navigating across the Southwest.
Impromptu Rest Stops Across America
Although they would have liked to organize their journey as a book tour for Stateless and American Wings: Chicago’s Pioneering Black Aviators and the Race for Equality in the Sky, a YA nonfiction title Wein coauthored with Sherri L. Smith, Wein and Gatland went where the wind and weather took them. “Honestly, I should have known,” she said. “One of the first aviation books I read was Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Listen! the Wind, which is all about sitting stuck in the same place for two weeks waiting for the right wind to come along.”
Along the way, they touched down at major airports like Phoenix’s Sky Harbor and dusty small towns alike. By chance, they alighted in Moton Field in Alabama, where the Tuskegee Airmen trained, and at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Tex., where the Women’s Air Force Service Pilots, or WASPs, learned to conduct transport flights in support of the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II.
The journey gave Wein insight into the real-life Black pilots of American Wings. “It’s just amazing what they were able to do, and without the communication tech that we have now,” she said. Traveling also showed her what her fictional characters would have to endure. “It’s not so much that I feel like one of my protagonists,” she said. “It’s that I have a lot of respect for them now,” as they navigate unforgiving terrain and fluctuating weather.
Wein points to a scene in Stateless where her heroine, Stella North, must fly over the Alps on one leg of the competition. “She’s apprehensive about crossing the mountains, and in one of my original drafts, I had her really quite scared,” Wein said. Wein and her lead editor, Little, Brown VP and executive editorial director Lisa Yoskowitz, “decided we needed to reel that back in because [Stella is] supposed to be intrepid.” Now that Wein has herself flown a 160hp single-engine plane from Arizona to New Mexico to Texas, “I’m thinking, she should have been scared! I did not know enough about mountain flying to adequately describe what might have happened to her during her alpine flights. I don’t think I made any major mistakes, but clearly she flew across the mountains on a calm day.”
Reflecting on her airborne travels, Wein remembers meeting kind people and feeling that “the Federal Aviation Administration does a good job of taking care of its airports and supporting its aviators.” Cruising the American skies and making spontaneous stops at historic airfields was revelatory, she said. “You choose where you’re going to go in the morning. You don’t know what you’re going to find when you land. I feel like we are cashing in on the very, very tail end of the golden age of aviation, a hundred years later.”
