Landings in America: Two People, One Summer, and a Piper Cub
A Flying Memoir
by Peter Egan
“When a Cub eventually reaches one or two thousand feet, you’re perfectly happy to level off, fold open the door and window, and look around at the countryside. Your flight path follows that ideal zone between the cool remoteness of the sky and the living warmth of the ground.”
Back in the day when this site was in its own infancy we told you about a book that “if you have any interest in flying and adventure, you’ll be staying up late into the night to finish.” Those words apply equally to this Landings in America which shares even more in common with that earlier-reviewed book as each is a memoir written decades after the adventure told about took place. And each is about a cross-country odyssey made by a pair in a Piper Cub.
Front endpaper is a map of US with entire route traced on it. Then, each of the forty chapters opens with the map detail for that chapter. Starting and end point is in Southern California.
The similarities end there though. That earlier reviewed book’s adventurers are brothers whose trip was in 1966. Landings in America tells of husband and wife Peter and Barbara Egan’s 1987 adventure.
Some reading this will instantly recognize Egan’s name for he is a now retired longtime staffer, columnist, product reviewer, and features writer with Road & Track and Cycle World magazines. Both his R&T column “Side Glances” and his “Leanings” column in Cycle World displayed his signature autobiographical and anecdotal style that earned him his loyal readership.
Back of book endpaper is the Cub’s owner’s guide drawing including the proper location of decals such as the lightning bolts, side numbers, and bear cub.
With this Landings, Egan—channeling a muse similar to the one inspiring books by the likes of John Steinbeck, Charles Kuralt, William Least-Heat Moon, and Richard Bach—writes not just of the “nuts and bolts” of his and Barb’s flying adventure for there’s that added richness and depth that only the perspective gained with the passage of time enables.
Especially for those not familiar with Egan’s distinctive style, here are a couple of samples from Landings.
“We’d no sooner stopped at the fuel pumps than the distinctive mellow roar of a vintage radial engine made us look up and behold a gigantic praying mantis about to attack the airport. It was a mutant creature out of a fifties sci-fi thriller, probably the result of too much radiation from an H-bomb test on a tropical island in the Pacific.
“As the insect grew closer, it morphed into the famous Miss Champion, a dark blue 1931 Pitcairn Autogiro. It had the Champion Spark Plug logo painted on the side and was quite beautiful to watch as it hovered in for a slow and graceful landing.
“It was a prehistoric helicopter, really, half open-cockpit monoplane and half Dutch windmill. Unlike a helicopter, however, the blades weren’t driven by the engine, but merely provided lift. It had short, stubby wings with upturned tips for stability, but most of the lift came from those big rotors. They could be angled to make it climb or descend almost vertically. . .”
Or this assessment of an area of the country recalled as part of describing an approach to an uncontrolled airfield in the wide-open spaces of Texas for fuel: “I’ve learned, in frequent travels across the Great Plains, that when a town [of a few thousand people] is distant from other towns and big cities, it tends to be self-contained and complete usually with nice parks, a busy main street with real stores, good schools, and a vibrant civic spirit. Kansas has a lot of these towns, too. They have their own skilled musicians, welders, poets, diesel mechanics, jewelers, landscape artists, plumbers, doctors, and nurses—and usually a decent newspaper. No one has to be brought in from the outside world to do anything that matters.”
Sample of page pair from 32-page insert of photos.
Egan and publisher Octane have included a bibliography. To describe it as an eclectic listing is understating it. That makes it a partial testament to how well—and widely—read Egan is. It pleased me to discover, too, that of the ninety books he lists, I can truly say I’ve read at least half of them with a number on my bookshelves. And in what is seemingly a recent publishing trend, Octane has thoughtfully bound in a bookmark ribbon that echoes a Cub’s proper color.
Don’t deny yourself the pleasure of accompanying the Egans in their Piper Cub seeing places they saw and meeting the people they visited during the summer of 1987. Not to mention the reading pleasure Peter’s words describing their Landings in America provides.
Copyright 2025 Helen V Hutchings (speedreaders.info)
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