Tragedy. We should face the facts, as McKendrick requires us to do. Kanno crashed, pointlessly, somewhere in the sea; the All-American Bombers dropped napalm on the Vietnamese, and in the beautiful and fragile Spads and Sopwiths and Fokkers the pilots had no parachutes, and died in horrifying numbers. McKendrick makes reference to The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, but Heavier Than Air is more complicated than Jarrell's poem - has more to do with the smile with which skulls are usually, and thinly, disguised in wartime:

A handsome young airman lay dying,
And as on the tarmac he lay,
To the mechanics who round him came sighing,
These last dying words he did say:
'Take the cylinders out of my kidneys,
The connecting-rod out of my brains,
Take the camshaft from out of my backbone,
And assemble the engine again.'

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