In the decade after the Armistice, the sky was a traveling circus. The U.S. government sold surplus Curtiss JN-4 "Jennys" for as little as $200—down from $5,000 in wartime—and thousands of demobilized pilots bought them, not for war, but for wonder. They were the barnstormers, gypsy flyers who followed the harvest and the county fair, landing in pastures, sleeping under wings, and selling five-minute rides for three to five dollars.

The stunts were death-defying and absurd. Aerialists walked wings, hung from landing gear, and leaped between planes in midair. Charles Lindbergh learned his trade in this circus, wing-walking and parachuting from breakaway cables before he ever saw the Atlantic. The Gates Flying Circus, operating from 1922 to 1928, flew an estimated one million passengers without a single serious injury. Its star, Clyde "Upside-Down" Pangborn, held the world record for midair plane changes and once rescued a tangled parachutist with his landing gear.

But the era was doomed by its own success. In 1927, federal safety regulations and the dwindling supply of cheap Jennys forced the flying circuses off the road. The barnstormers vanished into airline cockpits and Army flight schools, but they left behind a legacy: the belief that the airplane was not merely a machine of war, but a ticket to the imagination of ordinary people.