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For the narrator, the jet plane he is making with Clark symbolizes his desire to escape his troubling reality. The time spent working with Clark on the design routinely takes him away from his own house—and the tension and possible divorce the story implies is affecting his family. The project also sparks his imagination, not only in the design process but also in his daydreaming on his way home, when he fantasizes so vividly about flying above the town that he can feel the g-force in his arms and the wind whipping his face.
The plane’s symbolic escapism also explains why the narrator decides he wants to keep the project between him and Clark, despite the pleasant afternoon they spent at Freddy’s. Freddy and the narrator clearly still have the same common interests and connection, but the narrator chooses to exclude Freddy for the same reason he ran from the house the year before. Witnessing the hardships experienced by Freddy’s family make it harder for the narrator to ignore the problems within his own, especially seeing Freddy’s mom fail to recover, which demonstrates for him that things do not always, in fact, work out. The narrator wants—really, needs—to believe that the jet plane will come to fruition. Having Freddy around will make it harder for him to keep believing, so he cuts him off. His partnership with Clark is filled with tension, but the narrator sticks with Clark because he views Clark as a fortunate person from a lucky family who is more likely to help him make his escape.
While the plane symbolizes escape for the narrator, in the story more broadly it actually signifies the impossibility of any such escape. While the narrator believes that he and Clark will soon build a working jet plane, the reader always understands that two school kids have essentially no chance of success in this project. The jet plane is a pipe dream, and that such a pipe dream is the narrator’s way of escaping implies that the family tensions he is trying to escape can’t, in fact, be escaped—a fact further further supported by the realization at the end of the story that Clark, who the narrator wants to work with because he sees him as living in a perfect family, himself is worried about tension at home.
The Plane Quotes in Flyboys
The Flyboys quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Plane. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Flyboys
Quotes
Clark was stubborn but there was no meanness in him. He wouldn’t turn on you; he was the same one day as the next, earnest and practical. Though his family had money and spent it freely, he wasn’t spoiled or interested in possessions except as instruments of his projects. In the eight or nine months we’d been friends we had shot two horror movies with his dad’s 8mm camera, built a catapult that worked so well his parents made us take it apart, and fashioned a monstrous, unsteerable sled out of a bed frame and five wooden skis we found in his neighbor’s trash.
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They became an airplane, a jet—my jet. And through all the long run home I was in the cockpit, skimming sawtooth peaks, weaving through steep valleys, buzzing fishermen in the sound and tearing over the city in such a storm of flash and thunder that football games stopped in midplay, cheerleaders gaping up at me, legs still flexed under their plaid skirts.
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Freddy lived at the dead end of the street. As Clark and I got closer I could hear the snarl of a chain saw from the woods behind the house. Freddy and I used to lose ourselves all day in there. I hung back while Clark went up to the house and knocked.
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It was grisly stuff, and he didn’t scrimp on details or try to hide his pleasure in them, or in the starchy phrases he’d picked up from whatever book he was reading. That was Freddy for you. Gentle as a lamb, but very big on Vikings and Aztecs and Genghis Khan and the Crusaders, all the great old disembowlers and eyeball gougers. So was I. It was an interest we shared. Clark listened, looking a little stunned.
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“He seems okay. You know him better than I do.”
“Freddy’s great, it’s just…”
Clark waited for me to finish. When it was clear that I wasn’t going to, he said, “Whatever you want.”
I told him that all things considered, I’d just as soon keep it to the two of us.
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Get the entire Flyboys LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Plane Symbol Timeline in Flyboys
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Plane appears in Flyboys. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Flyboys
The narrator and his friend Clark decide they will build a jet plane, which they painstakingly design together at Clark’s house. Though Clark occasionally allows the narrator to...
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While Clark takes the lead in the hands-on drafting of the jet plane, the narrator takes the lead in the design choices for their project. He becomes domineering...
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...the genius in their relationship. At the end of each day of designing the jet plane, the precise and real blueprints Clark creates turn into a real plane in the narrator’s...
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After many months of working on the design of the plane, the planning process grows stagnant. Then one day at recess, Clark tells the narrator he...
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...of a classmate, Freddy. The narrator tells Clark he does not remember Freddy having an airplane canopy, but Clark assures him he does. When the narrator asks Clark why he told...
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Freddy’s mother then asks about the airplane, and Clark responds that they have just begun construction and are eager to return to...
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...get cleaned up, but Clark asks if they can at last go look at the plane canopy in the barn.
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...he is sure Freddy does not have one. He is shocked when Freddy presents the airplane canopy to them. Though the narrator has been in the barn hundreds of times, he...
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