SENIOR Editor Timothy Foote has only a bare three hours' solo time as a pilot, and that was long ago, before he gave up flying in favor of racing sailboats. But his interest in planes goes back to childhood when he built models, devoured copies of The Aeroplane and Popular Aviation and, after a stint in a Canadian prep school, dreamed of joining the Royal Canadian Air Force. At 16, though, he suddenly needed glasses and went to Harvard instead. ("At the time I was crushed," Foote recalls.) Recently, though, his fondness for planes was a help in getting acquainted with Richard Bach, the free-spirited pilot-author of bestselling Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the subject of the cover story that Foote wrote this week. Bach was in Bridgeport, Conn., making repairs on his plane when Foote called to discuss the possibility of a small story about Jonathan's success and its new deluxe edition. "He said he had a Grumman Widgeon and seemed delighted that I knew it was an amphibian," says Foote. As head of TIME'S Books section, Foote had chosen not to have Seagull reviewed when it first appeared. That small story, says Foote "was going to begin, 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull is at my throat again.' " But after a morning with Bach and his Widgeon, Foote saw the makings of a much larger article. "You can forgive Jonathan almost anything when you deal with Bach," he says. "He's an extraordinary man, in some ways a throwback to a simpler America, in some ways like the youth in the counterculture, reaching out for unorthodox ways of knowing himself and the world."

Correspondent James Willwerth got a firsthand taste of that lifestyle while accompanying Bach in the Widgeon on a barnstorming-style promotional tour from Akron to Los Angeles. Between daytime autographing sessions at bookstores and nighttime layovers at small county airports, Willwerth managed to get in a series of airborne interviews. "At times he had so much to say," recalls Willwerth, "that it was hard to keep him on one subject. We were constantly swapping anecdotes and laughing, and then suddenly I would have to reach for my notebook to keep the conversation from going to waste."

A former Viet Nam correspondent, Willwerth has had his share of hours on airliners, helicopters and transport planes. Flying with Bach, he found, is something different.

In Arizona, Bach guided the plane down for a landing amidst startled boaters to snatch an afternoon swim in Lake Havasu. Over Kansas, he handed Willwerth the controls. "I immediately learned the true meaning of sweaty palms," recalls Willwerth, who up to that moment had three fewer hours behind the wheel than Foote. Willwerth gamely hung on over three states before gratefully surrendering the controls in time for Bach to handle the landing.

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