Unnamed Contemporary Young People

"Saxophone girls and boys" is the label that the narrator of "All the Dead Pilots" uses for the generation that came of age in the 1920s, and so are too young to have experienced the Great War, as World War I was called (512). These modern young people know only modern aircraft and not the history of the unstable planes, like the Sopwith Camel, that the pilots flew thirteen years earlier in the war. Their "slipstream-proof lipstick and aeronautical flasks" are made for use in private airplanes, with safety features like "welded center sections and parachutes" (512) among similarly sheltered occupants.