Loop Dreams

The airplane turns 100 years old this year, with the anniversary of the Wright brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903. Almost as old is the deadly plane crash: the first airplane fatality took place in 1908, claiming the life of an Army lieutenant named Thomas Selfridge. Somewhere between flying and crashing, and combining the thrills of both, lies the terrifyingly dangerous sport of competitive aerobatics.

Joshua Ramo was a hobbyist pilot who found himself mysteriously drawn to aerobatics, which he compares to aerial figure skating, with the following caveat: "When was the last time Kristy Yamaguchi burst into flames in the middle of a Salchow?" In No Visible Horizon (Simon & Schuster; 273 pages), Ramo, a former TIME editor, tells the story of his love affair with a sport that in a bad year, by his estimate, can kill 1 in 30 of its practitioners. Ramo buys a plane and learns to spin, loop, roll and do all three simultaneously at hundreds of miles per hour. He makes pilgrimages to obscure Midwestern airfields for aerobatics competitions, and he seeks out those few masters of the sport who have survived long enough to pass on their wisdom. One of their truisms: "You will almost kill yourself once every hundred hours of flying."

As he trains, Ramo also tries to figure out what drives him to pursue such an arcane, expensive and deadly pastime. "What is extreme flying for me but a kind of dialogue?" he asks himself. "A conversation with myself about what I am capable of." Ramo's reverence for his fellow stunt pilots borders on the religious — he compares them variously with Yukio Mishima, John Coltrane and Pablo Picasso — and his lyrical flights sometimes lose the reader in the clouds. But when he's in the cockpit performing feats of gritty derring-do (and occasionally derring-don't), his airplane groaning and shuddering around him with the strain, the book soars. "Flight is a miracle that has been domesticated into triviality," he writes. "But out along its sharp edges...in those places where flying still draws blood, the chance for miracles remains."