Saint-Exupéry flew the mail in South America, and this is the night operation: Three planes converging on Buenos Aires from Patagonia, Chile, and Paraguay, and Rivière, the man on the ground who sends them out. One pilot flies into a cyclone over the Andes and loses the ground, the sky, and eventually the fuel. Rivière’s position is that the mail must move, that men are made harder by being required, and that his own pity would kill more of them than the weather does. It is very short and very hard, and the flying passages are written by somebody who had been in that cockpit.
Night Flight