[Cover Title]: Stall Sense

(White Plains, New York: Safe Flight Instrument Corp. 1952).

Price: $75.00

Softcover. First edition. Octavo. [16]pp. Profusely illustrated with cartoons. AOP (Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association) stamp on cover, label ("Jacques du Bois," possibly a bookseller ticket) partially removed from rear wrap. Slight vertical crease, neat note inked on one page, a very good copy.

Heavily illustrated comic advertisement, set in rhyming verse, for Safe Flight Instrument Corp.'s Pre-Stall Detector. Framed as a group of gossiping pilots grounded by bad weather, discussing the virtues of a stall detector, several of the drawings and verses incorporate rather sexist elements: "All I know a plane is just like a dame— / When stalling her symptoms are never the same." In the final stanzas, the pilots rush outside to watch an XF180 jet scream across the sky. Mort Engineer, with "his eyes all aglow" tells the group about the plane's many good qualities, of course one of which being equipped with a Pre-Stall Detector. The lower wrapper shows an angry man and a frightened-looking woman in a cockpit; the man is yelling (ostensibly to the plane), "Come on Baby Quit Stalling!"

The pamphlet is possibly a riff on a series of light-hearted "sense" training pamphlets ("Oxygen Sense," "Gunnery Sense," etc.) issued by the U.S. military in World War II. Safe Flight Instrument Corp., started in 1946, is still in business, and it seems that the stall detector was an important invention. An unusual period piece of aviation advertising. We have been unable to locate another copy.


Item #458525

item image

Item #458525 [Cover Title]: Stall Sense
[Cover Title]: Stall Sense