the Aviator is the first news of the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

In 1926, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry publishes it in the Navire of money , the review whose Jean Prévost is sub-editor.

The force of the account of Saint Exupéry is due deeply to the richness of tons with which it describes its impressions. It flew as of its more young age. This experiment of the flight and its qualities of writers materialize the impressions that the aviators, especially in these beginnings of aeronautics, could feel:

“Beaten by the wind of the propeller, the grass up to twenty meters behind seems to run. The pilot, of a movement of his wrist, unchains or retains the storm.

the noise swells now in the recoveries repeated until becoming a dense medium, almost solid, where the body is locked up. When the pilot feels it to fill in him all that there is the unsatiated one, it thinks: “It is well” then, of the reverse of the fingers, passes very close to the fuselage: nothing vibrates. He enjoys this energy if condensed. It leans: “Good-bye my friends…” For this good-bye in the paddle they trail immense shades. But with the threshold of this jump of more than three thousand kilometers, the pilot is already far from them: … He looks at the black cap pressed on the sky, with back-light, out of howitzer. Behind the propeller a gauze landscape trembles.

the engine idles now. One unties the handshakes like mooring ropes, the last. Silence is strange when one fastens his belt and the two belts of the parachute, then when of a movement of the shoulders, bust one adjusts with his body the fuselage. It is the departure even: consequently one is of another world. a last glance with the apron, horizon of dials, narrow but expressive - one brings back, careful, the altimeter to the zero - a last glance with the thick and short wings, a sign of the head: “That goes… ”, here it is the free one. having rolled wind slowly upright it draws with him the throttle lever, the engine, discharges from powder, blazes up, the plane, grabbed by the propeller; sink. The first jumps on the elastic air diminish and the pilot, who measures his speed with the reactions of the orders, is propagated in them, feels to grow. ”

Matérialisation of the impressions is remarkable in description that it makes us installation of the pilot on his aircraft. It becomes centaur, it does only one with its machine: “silence is strange when one fastens his belt and the two belts of the parachute, then when of a movement of the shoulders, bust one adjusts with his body the fuselage. ”

He still plays of metaphors by comparing the wind of the propeller with a river by the description of the movement of grass: “Beaten by the wind of the propeller, the grass up to twenty meters behind seems to run. ” Further this description of the physical feeling from the air become solid, “It looks at the black cap pressed on the sky”. It is exactly what one feels through the orders, handle and swing bars, when the speed of the plane is sufficiently high.

Without being a major work, the Aviator , reveals already the quality and the humanism of the writer who will reach with universal with the Small Prince .