NONFICTION - Jan. 3, 1993

WIDE BODY: The Triumph of the 747 by Clive Irving (Morrow: $25; 384 pp.). As we saw in Tom Wolfe’s portrayal of Chuck Yeager in “The Right Stuff,” many old Western cowboys traded in their saddles for pilot seats when the frontier started to run out. But by the time this story begins, even the sky has begun to look small. It is the late 1930s--Lucky Lindy has conquered distance with his 1927 New York City-Paris flight; new, fully pressurized airliners have begun sailing effortlessly over mountains; and in the commercial-aviation world, at least, once-sexy pursuits like speed have become less valued than such prosaic goals as lowering “seat-mile cost.”

The pilots, engineers and executives colorfully profiled here, however, did their best to make the boy’s game last as long as possible. The he-men included Donald Douglas, a descendant of the great Scottish engineers who gave nations their bridges, railroads and steam ships, and A.M. (Tex) Johnston, a wild test pilot with a Clark Gable mustache, roamin’ eyes and cowboy boots that he wore even when high diving fully clothed into swimming pools. (Women in this world are but fleeting images, like the “lissome young thing, clad only in a bath towel,” who greets one airline executive in a hotel room.)

These aviators’ underlying wistfulness about a bygone era shows through, though, in one scene where Boeing chief William Allen takes his first flight in a jet, a production version of the B-47. Feeling just a little too comfortable in the cabin (“everything has been done to insulate the passenger from the physical achievement of flight”), Allen, Irving writes, looks down from 35,000 feet: “The world was displayed as he had never seen it. The Great Plains had diminished to the proportions of a map. . . . There were no barriers left. Not mountains, not weather . . . but something was lost. What? The beginning. Humility, probably.”