West with the Night
by Beryl Markham
from North Point Press
One of the most beautifully crafted books I have ever read, with some of the most poetic prose passages I could imagine, such as the following, resonating with a stately and timeless quality so absent in our modern life:
There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.Born in England in 1902, Markham was taken by her father to East Africa in 1906. She spent her childhood playing with native Maruni children and apprenticing with her father as a trainer and breeder of racehorses. In the 1930s, she became an African bush pilot, and in September 1936, became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.
Alive
by Piers Paul Read
from Harper Perennial
On October 12, 1972, an Uruguayan Air Force plane carrying a team of rugby players crashed in the remote snowy peaks of the Andes. Ten weeks later, only sixteen of the forty-five passengers were found alive. This is the story of those ten weeks spent in the shelter of the plane's fuselage without food and with scarcely any hope of a rescue. The survivors protected and helped one another, and came to the difficult conclusion that to live meant doing the unimaginable. Confronting nature at its most furious, two brave young men risked their lives to hike through the mountains looking for help -- and ultimately found it.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.Flying the SR-71 Blackbird: In the Cockpit on a Secret Operational Mission
by Richard H. Graham
from Zenith Press
For anyone who has ever wondered what its like to fly the SR-71 on a secret Mach 3 reconnaissance mission, this book has the answer. Flying the SR-71 Blackbird takes readers along on an operational mission that only a few Air Force pilots have ever experienced. The Lockheed SR-71, unofficially known as the Blackbird, was an advanced, long-range, Mach 3 strategic reconnaissance aircraft developed by Lockheed Skunk Works. The aircraft flew so fast and high that not one was ever shot down, even by a missile. SR-71 pilot and instructor Colonel Richard Graham offers a rare cockpit perspective on how regular Air Force pilots and navigators transformed themselves into SR-71 Blackbird crews, turning their unique aviation talents to account in an unprecedented way. Arguably the worlds foremost expert on piloting the Blackbird, Graham details, as no one else could, what an SR-71 mission entails, from donning a pressure suit to returning to base.
Flying the SR-71 Blackbird takes readers along on an operational mission that only a few Air Force pilots have ever experienced. The Lockheed SR-71, unofficially known as the Blackbird, was an advanced, long-range, Mach 3 strategic reconnaissance aircraft developed by Lockheed Skunk Works. The aircraft flew so fast and high that not one was ever shot down. SR-71 pilot and instructor Colonel Richard Graham offers a rare cockpit perspective on what an SR-71 mission entails, from donning a pressure suit to returning to base.
The Spirit of St. Louis
by Charles A. Lindbergh
from Scribner
Along with most of my fellow fliers, I believed that aviation had a brilliant future. Now we live, today, in our dreams of yesterday; and, living in those dreams, we dream again...." -- From The Spirit of St. Louis
Charles A. Lindbergh captured the world's attention -- and changed the course of history -- when he completed his famous nonstop flight from New York to Paris in 1927. In The Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh takes the reader on an extraordinary journey, bringing to life the thrill and peril of trans-Atlantic travel in a single-engine plane. Eloquently told and sweeping in its scope, Lindbergh's Pulitzer Prize-winning account is an epic adventure tale for all time.
Jane's Aircraft Recognition Guide Fifth Edition (Jane's Recognition Guides)
by Michael J. Gething
from Collins
The essential guide to the world's aircraft
- Over 500 color photographs
- Civilian and military aircraft
- Technical data
- Recognition silhouettes
- Aircraft markings identification guide
Yeager: An Autobiography
by Chuck Yeager
from Bantam
General Chuck Yeager, the greatest test pilot of them all -- the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound . . .the World War II flying ace who shot down a Messerschmitt jet with a prop-driven P-51 Mustang . . .the hero who defined a certain quality that all hotshot fly-boys of the postwar era aimed to achieve: the right stuff.
Now Chuck Yeager tells his whole incredible life story with the same "wide-open, full throttle" approach that has marked his astonishing career.  What it was really like enaging in do-or-die dogfights over Nazi Europe.  How after being shot over occupied France, Yeager somehow managed to escape.  The amazing behind-the-scenes story of smashing the sound barrier despite cracked ribs from a riding accident days before.
The entire story is here, in Yeager's own words, and in wondeful insights from his wife and those friends and colleagues who have known him best.  It is the personal and public story of a man who settled for nothing less than excellence, a one-of-a-kind portrait of a true American hero.
Flight in America: From the Wrights to the Astronauts
by Roger E. Bilstein
from The Johns Hopkins University Press
Roger E. Bilstein's Flight in America has won acclaim as the foremost history of one of the twentieth century's landmark achievements -- human flight. In this revised and expanded third edition, Bilstein chronicles changes in military, commercial, and space aviation in the 1990s. He offers a glimpse of the developments one might expect in the new millennium.
Richly illustrated and splendidly written, Flight in America charts the manifold ways in which the airplane has touched virtually every feature of American enterprise, history, and culture -- leisure and business travel, commercial transportation, national defense, and imaginative literature. More than 125 lively photographs document the beauty of flying machines and the daring of the men and women who invented, built, and flew them.Praise for previous editions:"The most comprehensive survey of the history of American aeronautics and space flight yet published." -- Technology and Culture
"Bilstein casts wide and far to net virtually everything from technological trends and research and development to the effect of air travel on the expansion of major league baseball in the 1950s and early 1960s... A superior work that will satisfy aero buffs and professionals alike." -- Journal of American History
"By far the best book on man and air travel yet written." -- Cleveland Plain Dealer
"For those who won't soon be able to visit the National Air and Space Museum, perhaps the next best thing would be to read Flight in America." -- Chronicle of Higher Education
35 Miles from Shore: The Ditching and Rescue of ALM Flight 980
by Emilio Corsetti III
from Odyssey Publishing
On May 2, 1970, a DC-9 jet with 57 passengers and a crew of six departed from New York’s JFK International Airport en route to the tropical island of St. Maarten, but four hours and 34 minutes later the flight ended in the shark-infested waters of the Caribbean. It was, and remains, the only open-water ditching of a commercial jet. The subsequent rescue of survivors took nearly three hours and involved the coast guard, navy, and marines. This gripping account of that fateful day recounts what was happening inside the cabin, the cockpit, and the helicopters as the crews struggled against the weather and dwindling daylight to rescue the survivors, who had only their life vests and a lone escape chute to keep them afloat.
Pan American Clippers: The Golden Age of Flying Boats
by James Trautman
from Boston Mills Press
Recapturing the fabulous era of flying boats.
For a world coming out of economic depression in the 1930s, the Pan American Airways Clipper "flying boats" symbolized elegance and luxury, adventure and romance. Illustrated with rare period photographs, vintage travel posters, magazine ads and colorful company brochures, this fascinating book covers every aspect of the fabulous era of Pan American's graceful clippers.
Like their maritime namesakes, the Clippers used the oceans to form a vast global network of travel routes. Pan Am founder Juan Trippe was a visionary who saw the importance of international travel to a changing world. His Clippers would play a key role in the evolution of transoceanic flight, setting time and distance records over the Atlantic and Pacific, providing airmail delivery between countries, and eventually serving the Allies as troop and cargo transports during World War II.
Pan Am Clippers permanently changed the world's concept of time and space by dramatically reducing travel time and opening up international air travel to the general public.
This fascinating, informative and richly illustrated book brings back another time and way of life.
SR-71 Blackbird: Stories, Tales and Legends
by Rich Graham
from Zenith Press
For a quarter-century, Lockheed's Mach 3 SR-71A Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft dominated the skies as no other. The men that flew the 55-ton "Habu" (so dubbed by Okinawans near one of its bases because of its resemblance to a local deadly black snake) at 80,000 feet and 33 miles per minute were the rarest of fraternities, and author and former 9th Recon Wing commander Richard Graham provides a score of them--as well as key ground personnel--a generous forum for their self-penned recollections here. Where Graham's first book, SR-71 Revealed: The Inside Story, dealt more with the Blackbird's remarkable hardware and history, this volume details the human dimensions of the SR-71 program, from its dangerous days of development and testing through decades of intelligence-gathering operations in the world's hot spots, to its final, bittersweet confrontation with the one foe it couldn't elude: self-serving Pentagon politics. Inspired by flying a plane that often seemed to have a mind of its own--and a sometimes malicious one at that--the anecdotes here are seasoned with a compelling mix of boyish humor, sheer terror, and enviable camaraderie. As Graham's fellow SR-71 pilot and author Brian Shul once noted, more people have stood atop Mt. Everest than have flown what remains the world's fastest, highest-flying jet. (The author is donating all royalties to the J.T. Vida Memorial Fund, set up to preserve Blackbird 972, whose 1990 transcontinental, record-setting retirement flight is recounted herein, currently housed at the Smithsonian Museum) --Jerry McCulley
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