No Visible Horizon by Joshua Cooper Ramo

Author:Joshua Cooper Ramo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2004-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The highest-ranked

American aerobatic pilot

in the world is unemployed.

The highest-ranked American aerobatic pilot in the world is unemployed. For the better part of the last twenty years, Robert Armstrong has bounced from job to job. They have often been long bounces. Armstrong is forty-eight years old and at times during his career he has flown jumbo jets on glamorous routes like New York-Europe. Once, flying a DC-8 into London, he watched as the contrails of other planes ahead of him knit a perfect web, pink in the blue dawn sky. “They pay us for this,” his captain remarked in the silent cockpit, apropos of the heaven stretched in front of them. At other times Armstrong has made his living from scrap work, moving businessmen from one Georgia town to another in a lumpy single-engine plane he would repair with his own hands between flights. Armstrong is an artist. His employment status is no indication of his talent, any more than Picasso’s might have been. People clear their throats when Robert flies, the way you might at a museum to silence the riff-raff around you. “There are only a few people in the world who can fly like that,” Sergei Boriak says of Robert.

Armstrong has the Southerner’s gift for universal laws laid down by the limits of his own experience, the mental geography of a man who only believes in the parts of the world he has seen with his own eyes. Every Mexican restaurant in the state of Arkansas has ptomaine poisoning, he will say assuredly. He follows the law with a story of woe and misery that features some beef fajitas.

Armstrong once worked for an airline called Legend, which operated out of Dallas in airplanes configured with only first-class seats. The company spent millions on a legal battle against American Airlines and millions on marketing, leaving it no money actually to run the airline. Thus Legend became history. Armstrong once worked for an Atlanta-based airline that specialized in toting rich people down to the Caribbean. It had trouble surviving the summers. Law: The only people who run airlines are incompetent idiots.

Once Armstrong was dating a girl who wanted to be a flight engineer. He helped her study for the F.E. test and then decided to take it for himself just out of curiosity. She scored 99 percent. He scored 19 percent lower. A job opened up. In those pre-ERA days the job went to the one with the mustache (the low scorer). Robert had a nice ride there, flying international legs on DC-8s. Before that job he had been as far west as Kansas and as far north as Oshkosh, Wisconsin, picking up airplanes. After a year on the DC-8 you could give him his passport and $500 and he’d go anywhere in the world. Including to a new job. At a startup. Which went under in a year. His girlfriend’s 99 percent got her a job with a big airline, where she is now, twenty years later, a senior pilot with a regular check.

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