I enjoyed doing some hangar flying on the Dec. 15, 2025 edition of “Hangar Talk,” the podcast of AOPA, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. My friend Tom Haines and I discussed, among other things, what it must have been like to fly the Westland Lysander, which is the light single-engine aircraft flown by my character Philippe in The Mapmaker. (I think for a modern pilot, that thing would have been a handful.) Imagine navigating by landmarks at night, slipping into Nazi-occupied Europe, armed with nothing but a pistol.