Recommend any good aviation-related books?

[mosteen 111]

[jmdriskell 178]

Along with the others mentioned, I'd recommend:

 

"Wings of Man, The Legend of Captain Dick Merrill" by Jack L. King

"Red Ball in the Sky" by Charles F. Blair

"The Long Way Home, Revised Edition, A Journey Into History with Captain Robert Ford" by EdDover

Anything by Dan Hampton

"Gunther Rall, A Memoir" by Jill Amadio

"Sky Gods, The Fall of PanAm" by Robert Gandt.

 

If you buy one of these books from Amazon for your Kindle, Amazon will remind you of many more.  It's marketing, but it sure exposes one to a lot of good books.

 

Jim Driskell

[KJConlon 17]

I thought that North Star Over My Shoulder was a pretty good read as was Starship Diaries.

 

Kevin

[The Milkman 0]

Sales from this novel will help keep  Mission Aviaton Fellowship aircraft flying  in Haiti...

 

  "A museum piece aircraft, the Mach 3, XB-70 Valkyrie, is suddenly moved from the exhibit floor

of the Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson AFB to Hangar 18 where a "Skunk Works" team of

scientists and engineers rebuild it to fly again on a high priority secret mission halfway round the world.
   The government and Air Force have an aggressive combat mission in mind...but the crew who will fly

Valkyrie have another."

 

                                                   http://www.airnspace.com/

[Dave Morgan 68]

I thought I'd give this thread a bit of a prod.

 

Here are a few more...

 

Island Pilot

Whitfield, Capt A

ISBN 1898852057

British bush flying. Memoir of setting up the Shetland Islands' service by Loganair. Ambulance, charter and scheduled flights in a good deal of marginal weather between 1969 and 1977, on equally marginal runways, and a constant struggle against the Shetland Islands' Council to improve the service for the locals. Less than eighty pages but sympathetic, empathetic, humorous and in a couple of places very sad. It's out of print but if you can get hold of a copy, this little gem is well worth having.

 

 

Dead Weight

Lecomber, Brian

ISBN 9780860093114

Long since OOP, my copy is second-hand, through Amazon Marketplace. Our unwilling hero is a lower working-class commercial pilot drawn in the idiom of Ian Fleming and trying to keep on the straight and narrow a decade after doing a stretch for importing illegal immigrants and heroin. And falling off it because of the nasty people he keeps meeting. Action adventure fiction with lots of flying. First published in 1976 and set a few years earlier in Dominica, Antigua, St Kitts and Puerto Rico the story doesn't seem to have aged at all.

 

I don't know much about flying but to judge by the YouTube video 'Brian Lecomber in Cockpit Footage', his descriptions of aircraft and their use are surely authentic and accurate as well as enthralling. The author, founder of Firebird Aerobatics, died last year. Turn Killer was, I think, his first novel, which was just as entertaining but had less flying and more shooting.

 

 

Talkdown

Lecomber, Brian

ISBN 9780698109377

Gripping, as the blurb says. And as the absent Chock told us in an earlier thread, 'Where our hero has to talk down a passenger in an Arrow over the UK'. The basis of the story is that the pilot of an Arrow passes out from a sub-arachnoid haemorrhage just after setting up the cruise and half-way through changing the comm frequency, leaving his girlfriend alone at 5000 feet, to be intercepted by another plane and talked down by its pilot.

 

The author, an aerobatic display pilot for a long number of years, portrayed perfectly the sensory and cognitive overload of the first-time student pushed too far. He also wrote so vividly that I felt an intense frustration at being unable to tell 'our hero' of a critical oversight on his part. The end, as you might expect,came very suddenly, and the end of the book was just as abrupt. Mostly a happy ending though.

 

 

On a Wing and a Prayer: The untold story et c.

Levine, Joshua

ISBN 9780007269457

I think it was originally 'Fighter Heroes of WW1', by the author of the 'Forgotten Voices…' series. The book is for the most part extracts from contemporary letters and from interviews with those who flew in the Great War. It brings to life everything from pre-war pioneering, through combat, living conditions and technical advances to emotional disturbance and demobilisation. It's very successful at drawing attention to a forgotten aspect of the Great War. But... and it's a big 'but'... there's an awful lot missing. The entire book is based around the western front and the south east of England. The stories that are related, being first-hand accounts, are both vivid and fascinating, and the book does illuminate very well the military side of early aviation, but Levine could have been more honest and used a title like 'First world war aerial warfare over the western front from the English perspective'.

 

The RNAS, which eventually had fifty squadrons is only mentioned in the context of political squabbles with the Royal Flying Corps. The book is sub-titled 'The untold story of the pioneering aviation heroes of WW1' but there's no mention of the pioneering first take-off from an aircraft carrier (HMS Vindex) in 1915, the pioneering successful use of torpedoes off Gallipoli, the pioneering use of two-way radio by the German naval air service, nor of the first sinking of a submarine by a flying boat. Zeppelins are mentioned only as targets - we are told nothing about flying them. With the exception of the Sikorsky IM, heavy bombers came late to the war but with 230 × Gotha G-IV, 550 × HP O/400 and over 700 Caproni heavy bombers built the entire class surely deserves more than ten pages out of three hundred and fifty.

 

Most annoyingly three aviation heroes, Eddie Rickenbacker, Billy Bishop and Ernst Udet each get only one sentence.

 

 

Beyond the Blue Horizon

Frater, A

9780330433129

Mid nineteen eighties journey using commercial flights to follow the Imperial Airways route from London to Brisbane. Broadly entertaining travelogue but full of eighties hyperbole and a few technical inaccuracies. The author liberally peppers his writing with the worst kinds of cliché (that was deliberate) and appends at least two adjectives to every noun: 'It was empty now, suffused with a heavy morning calm, and I sat and surveyed the airy French Renaissance edifice enclosing an enchanted garden splashed with the inky shadows of... et c., et c.'. Personally, I found his prose rather tedious but in his favour it brings very vividly to life each of the places he visited and the people he met.

 

On the other hand he does make stuff up, such as the following night-time view from the cockpit of an Olympic Airbus between Athens and Cairo: 'The winking navigation beacon of a 747 passed below us and slid away to the west, its two decks awash with light, gaudy as a boulevard.' Extraordinary eyesight. Fond of describing aviation with maritime similies, he nevertheless calls the tiller a 'steering bar' and insists the Airbus has pneumatic disc brakes. He may be right but I can't help feeling he meant hydraulic. There are no pictures at all - neither of the modern journey nor of the original - and he provides no references for any of his quotations.

 

A good story all the same, dark and sweaty like a Joseph Conrad, but the author's writing style leaves me feeling that if I met him in the pub he'd get very boring very fast.

 

 

Ah well, back to the bookshop.

 

D

[Fielder 3,673]

[ViperPilot 81]

fielder,

 

Have you read The Long Way Home, by Ed Dover? A great tie-in to your book, for sure!

 

Amazing to think hot much Tech went into those Flying Boats during that Time Period... the M-130, S-42 and B-314, along with all of the small ones, like the S-38 and S-39!

 

Alan  :smile:

[JBlack 8]

These look interesting

 

Squawk 7700

 

http://www.amazon.com/Squawk-7700-Peter-M-Buffington/dp/0971208417/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1H7ATF6700F3TKH1T4ZG

 

Emergency: Crisis on the Flight Deck

By Stanley Stewart

 

http://www.amazon.com/Emergency-Crisis-Flight-Stanley-Stewart-ebook/dp/B0087GZ1WQ/ref=pd_sim_351_4?ie=UTF8&dpID=5117fUVe5lL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR107%2C160_&refRID=1CNJKH63B27B6E5K3ER9

 

Dangerous Lessons and Guardian Angels: An airline pilot's story

 

http://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Lessons-Guardian-Angels-airline/dp/0615588204/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

[Fielder 3,673]

Thanks, Long Way Home looks really interesting.

I will have to buy that book!

The B-314 flying boat went round the world to get to America under radio blackout after wwii started against Japan.

 

 

BTW, the flying boats from the UK to South Africa in the '30s had to fly low and slow, all the better to see the huge herds of animals below (giraffe, elephants, gazelle, etc.). Back then game herds were huge and a joy to observe from your airliner. 

[Dave Morgan 68]

Another prod...

 

 

Think Like a Bird

Alex Kimbell

9781904744054

An army pilot's training in AOP9 and Beaver, and subsequent tour in Aden, presumably in the mid-sixties. Amazon's 'Look inside' held me spellbound for three pages so I bought it. There's a good deal of description of the technical aspect of flying and of learning to fly light aircraft but it's by no means excessive: in his foreword the author states 'One can only write about pumping the flaps up and down so many times, and by the time the reader has read half the book, they will have a good idea of how to fly an aeroplane.' On the other hand, the bald description blends seamlessly with personal reflections and service anecdotes. The narrative has a warmth and an open-hearted honesty that has put the book firmly at the top of my list along with Fate is the Hunter, Chickenhawk, A Lonely Kind of War, Clear Left, Island Pilot and Stranger to the Ground. To paraphrase the opening sentence, if it wasn't for the fact that I can read it again, this book would be too damn short.

 

 

Freefall: from forty one thousand feet

William Hoffer

9780671696894 

About Air Canada Flight 143 that ran out of fuel at FL410 and landed on a race track in 1983. Mostly filler. You could triple the quality of the text by deleting two thirds of the writing. Compared with QF32 by Richard de Crespigny, this book is barely even holiday reading. The Wikipedia entry for 'Gimli Glider' is both more informative and more gripping.

 

 

Thud Ridge

Jack Broughton

9780859791168

Autobiographical account of flying the F-105 over Vietnam from bases in Thailand. Interesting from an historical and an anecdotal perspective. I couldn't put it down. The accounts of his sorties are extremely vivid but the main impression I had was one of utter disillusionment with the way the armed forces' overall strategy was applied, the way you're no longer a person when you're clad in olive drab, and the way incompetence inevitably results in someone else's death. Despite the foregoing, the writing style is dry and impersonal; it gives the book the feel of a mildly critical internal document.

 

 

Mosquito Pathfinder

Albert & Ian Smith

9780907579786

I've recently been taking an eclectic path through Crécy Publishing's catalogue. The author concentrates more on where his 90 ops went and on what he dropped than on how he felt or on what he did on leave. Despite his protestation of fear, three voluntary tours tell another story. The brief interludes - getting absolutely hammered at the end of a North African tour in Welllingtons, learning to use the loo before going to bed drunk (you'll have to read it), nearly losing three fingers to a car door when... very drunk and the first sight of his fiancée in uniform (you'll have to read that too) - gave light relief from the frustration of unreliable equipment and the eternal black nightmare of the marking runs.

 

 

Lancaster Target

Jack Currie

9780907579281

The blurb begins with, 'Described as one of the best three books about life in Bomber Command during World War Two.' Without knowing what the other two are, it's certainly the best I've read. There's something about it that reminds me of Fate is the Hunter, but without the regret that Gann expresses so eloquently. Rather, it's that both pilots put across very well the way in which plane and crew become a single entity. Although Currie's outlook has much more of the bawdy about it, and considerably less of Gann's reverie, I think had Gann flown Lancasters out of east England in 1944 he could well have written this book. There's no higher praise.

 

 

Haynes de Havilland Mosquito owners' workshop manual

Falconer J & Rivas B

9780857333605

I have difficulty reviewing this as my love of the Mosquito is that of a layman: I've never even seen one in the flesh. It's not a workshop manual, it's an illustrated history of the plane from its inception through to current restoration projects. Published in 2013, it's missed the more recent restoration projects. The paper is a coated semi-gloss which is ideal for very crisp b&w historical photos, colour pics of projects in various states of reassembly and extracts from technical drawings. There are plenty of whole-page photos and even the smallest are well printed. The text is well written and easy going with chapters on conception, manufacture, wartime roles, anatomy, pilots' perception, maintenance and restoration. Tables are in short supply, which will disappoint nerds but if you simply think it's a beautiful plane and want to know more then this is a lovely book. In fact, my only criticism is that the binding is single sheets into glue which means the two-page cutaway drawing disappears into the gutter. A fold-out sheet would have been far nicer. I'd have paid another fiver for an A2 poster...

 

 

I think another trip to the bookshop is in order.

D

[Johan_Dees 84]

CATCH-22 if you wanna have a really good laugh!

[Johan_Dees 84]

I want to add another good read:

 

35 MILES FROM SHORE

by Emillio Corsetti III

 

About a DC9 running out of fuel, an fine read!

[Johan_Dees 84]

QF32 also a good read! by Richard de Crespigny:

 

Coral and I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Glenmore Road, Paddington, in Sydney’s inner city. Coral got a job managing Joint Ventures for the Australian Petroleum Management Fund. Life was pretty simple then. I remember one night lying with Coral on the floor (we had no lounge furniture) watching flies land on the ceiling; how did they do it? Was it a loop or a barrel roll before touchdown?

Qantas pay scales were very low for entry-level pilots. I started on a second officer’s salary of $3657 per 56 days (with $266 overseas pay), and I trained at Mascot on Boeing 747 Classic aircraft. This was 1986, when Qantas was still solely international and the only airline in the world to fly Jumbos exclusively. Murray Warfield, a fellow ex-RAAF pilot who also joined my course, had three young children at the time and he qualified for social security payments to supplement his meagre income.

There were four pilots on my 747 conversion course, but two of them left just before we started to join Cathay for a lot more money. Cathay called me about a year after that and offered me a job flying out of Hong Kong. I said, ‘Double my salary and we’ll talk.’ I’m glad they didn’t get back to me; I love Australia and I didn’t want to be tempted to move countries simply for the money. Qantas replaced the two Cathay-bound pilots and we moved on. We trained in simulators, learning the aircraft and all the possible failures that could befall them, which meant going over and over the standard operating procedures (SOPs) and checklists.

The early generation Jumbos produced up until the late 1980s were given the affable title ‘Classic’. These aircraft had no computer networks, so engineers were carried to manage the complex systems. The Classic Jumbo range comprised the early generation 100 and 200 series (with the short upperdeck bubble), and the 300 series (with the longer bubble). With hindsight, the 747 Classics were fairly simple ‘steam-driven’ aircraft, essentially like a Cessna except bigger, faster and with more thrust. They had very simple thrust control: long cables connected the thrust levers to each engine. You had four throttle levers in a row, and the aim was to carefully push them forward or pull them back in unison because the jet crabbed sideways if the levers were not aligned (the engines on one side would power up with more thrust than the engines on the other side).

The pilot of any light jet aircraft would have felt at home in the Classic Jumbo’s cockpit. We had to manually compensate for the secondary effects of the controls (aileron, rudder). For example, when the ailerons are moved to roll the aircraft, the pilot must also pull back (move the elevators) to stop the nose dropping, and move the rudder pedals to stop the passengers slipping sideways in their seats – jobs done automatically these days.

Qantas had an exciting international network in the 1980s, servicing destinations in five of the seven continents. There were a lot of airports to get used to. My favourite airports were Hong Kong (Kai Tak), Tahiti, Los Angeles, Rome, Athens, Paris and London.

Kai Tak was one of the two most challenging airports I experienced in the Qantas network. When landing towards the south, pilots flew the infamous IGS dogleg approach as it avoided the 3300 foot–high mountains that prevented simpler straight-in approaches. The approach to runway 13 was a wonderful exercise in planning, using visual and instrument cues to fly, and crew support. It was even more challenging in conditions of poor visibility and strong crosswinds. We descended in cloud on the first part of the dogleg approach, aiming 47 degrees to the left of the airport. If we saw flashing strobes starting to appear through the cloud as we approached the minimum altitude, we could continue the approach visually and land (even though we couldn’t see the airport or the runway). Once we made the decision to continue, it was a bit like the goat track approach at Tapini – we had to keep descending, our only reference being the line of strobes as they led us into a right turn. At the end of the turn we would skim a few hundred feet over the tops of residential buildings while the locals nonchalantly hung their washing to dry on their roofs. The right turn finally finished as we passed 300-feet altitude with the runway straight in front of us. Here’s the catch. If there was a strong tailwind on the first leg of the approach it would become a crosswind from the right after we had turned through the 47-degree right turn onto finals. That final turn is made so low that we only had time to make one wing-down followed by a wing-up movement to align with the runway – only one turn so we had to be precise.

A good co-pilot earns his pay on this approach. You could easily end up in a situation where it’s unsafe to continue to land. Wise pilots who blew the approach ‘went around’ and tried again. One unwise pilot who continued with an unstable approach, in 1993, ended up over-running the end of the runway and parking ignominiously in Hong Kong’s harbour.

I loved flying the Classic Jumbo. By the time I entered Qantas, the Classic had been in operation for almost eighteen years and Qantas was trying to get the final ounces of thrust from what was ageing engine technology.

They injected 2400 kilograms of de-mineralised water into each engine during take-off to enable operations from hot, humid places, such as Cairns, with a full load. (The water reduced the internal engine temperatures, permitting more fuel to be introduced, and so more thrust. Steam also provided a thrust benefit.) The JT9 engines on the Classic could produce just 45,500 pounds of thrust (dry) and 47,000 pounds (wet) when the complicated water injection was used. These days, the new A380’s Trent 900 engine has been tested up to 93,000 pounds of thrust, though Qantas only pushes it to 72,000 pounds.

The Classic Jumbo’s technology was leading edge for its time, but is now regarded as primitive. The auto-landing system was a humble mechanical device, incorporating lots of servos and actuators that delivered mediocre performance and reliability, and needed to be checked regularly. In the 200- and 300-series Jumbos, some of the automated systems and warnings were retrofitted. There were switches and warning lights for everything, but there were no computers to monitor them. We had to continually scan the panels for failures, and every twenty minutes the engineer would record about 50 engine and system parameters in an A2-sized log book that would be returned to Sydney for plotting and analysis. There were no warning computers or electronic checklists, so even the simplest failures could take a long time to resolve. For example, in 1988, the leading edge slats failed to deploy when I was approaching to land at Melbourne airport. It took the three of us (two pilots and one engineer) 30 minutes to work through the emergency checklist – a procedure that would only take two pilots ten minutes today.

The navigation systems were good for their time, but there was no GPS technology. We used Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) technology developed from the aerospace programs that used mechanical gyroscopes and accelerometers. INSs were impressive back then; we could launch from Sydney, turn off all our radio aids and trust our navigation to three US$100,000 Litton INSs. Twelve hours later, as we approached Los Angeles airspace, we would be confident our position was accurate to within 72 kilometres (39 nautical miles). (GPS today would put us inside 3 metres – 23,000 times more accurate and at a fraction of the cost.)

All pilots on the flight deck were busy when we flew from Asia to Europe. On a flight to London we’d pick one route from a selection of about twenty. The route would have about 200 waypoints – positions on the ground provided by countries to control where aircraft enter, transit and leave their airspace. We would expect to be intercepted by fighters if we diverted from our cleared route. Each waypoint’s position was defined by latitude and longitude references printed on our flight plan and navigation charts. Those 200 coordinates had to be input into the INS by a pilot on the flight deck – a slow, laborious job that is done automatically by data uplink these days. One by one, the support pilots would load successive (fifteen-character) coordinates into each of the INS’s nine waypoint slots; it was all the INS could handle. The INS was then coupled to the autopilot and the aircraft would track to the next waypoint. It was a simple system that needed constant attention. In the days before 9/11, we’d welcome some passengers into the flight deck and show them how it all worked.

I remember one time over Russia in the middle of the night, I was entering my next sequence of nine coordinates into the machine and I must have been distracted because suddenly one of the waypoints was displayed to be 13,000 kilometres (7000 nautical miles) distant – the giveaway that I’d entered an incorrect character. The manual exercise of inputting these 135 characters, then methodically crosschecking the waypoints (by checking tracks and distances) sometimes occupied the entire focus of the support pilot. In Russia, where waypoints can be separated by one or two minutes, your efforts to pre-load the next nine INS waypoints would be in vain when the air traffic controller then cleared you to track from waypoint 1 direct to waypoint 9, and you’d have to go through your sequence and scrub out the ones now not needed then load new waypoints ahead again. It’s worth noting that the generation of flyers before us thought we had it easy; up to the 1960s navigators used sextants and slide-rules – they could plot by the stars if they had to.

Radio communications were dreadful back then, nothing like the pleasant environment we share today. Very high frequency (VHF) radios are the preferred choice to deliver clear reception over short distances (up to 280 kilometres or 150 nautical miles). But last century many countries couldn’t provide a VHF infrastructure so we used high frequency (HF) radios to communicate with the controllers. HF communications suffer from two problems: quality and interference. The controller’s voice was often drowned out by the ‘hiss’ from noise and solar activity (flares) that charge up the Earth’s ionosphere, and our HF transmissions were being constantly over-transmitted by multiple people.

The stress for today’s crews flying from Asia into Europe has changed. The INS has been replaced by multiple flight management computers that upload or understand the world’s routes. Pilot stress is reduced because clear VHF communications are now available in most countries. The Traffic Collision and Avoidance System (TCAS) was introduced in the mid-1990s and provided an extraordinarily successful last line of defence against mid-air collisions.

The Classic Jumbos were tough, reliable old planes. Bits would fall off and they’d still fly. One time I was flying from Sydney to Auckland and we were hit by a very strong bolt of lightning. As the aircraft became electrostatically charged, every particle of dust in that aircraft lifted up and hung in the air as if suspended. We lost one HF radio because the lightning vaporised the 4 millimetre–thick steel tube that was our HF antenna, but the plane barely reacted. It had been developed to be a military transport and it was tough.

Today, the stresses the Classic pilots had to endure have been reduced, but there are new problems to contend with – congestion, aircraft complexity, aircraft performance, aircraft automation, fatigue, complex airspace and complex air traffic control instructions. All of these factors steadily increase with time while the number of pilots in the cockpit decreases.

Pilots worked up to twenty-hour tours of duty and slept in bunks beside the cockpit, but it was more luxurious than the Air Force: all the accommodation, transportation, flight plans, fuel calculations and paperwork were organised for us by Qantas. When you shut down the engines you didn’t have to secure the aircraft; you just walked away and climbed into a dedicated bus bound for the crew hotel.

It took some time to get used to flying with such a large flight crew on the Classics. The normal crew complement consisted of the captain, one first officer (FO), one second officer (SO) and one engineer. The SO relieved the pilots and the engineer in the cruise. On flights longer than twelve hours, we’d have an additional SO for inflight relief. With five technical crew members, the Classic’s cockpit was congested on long-haul sectors, and sometimes the overcrowding produced interesting human dynamics.

 

I would like to have a good 747 classic for FS.

RFP has a bad outdated VC, and CLS is goodlooking, but no depth, and slams on the runway due to bad xml landing gear..

I only can dream...

[mtrainer 136]

Excellent thread.

 

I've read nearly all the books that mention B-52s flying over Vietnam, since my dad few on those during the early 70s.

 

One of the best books that I can highly recommend, is "Baa Baa Black Sheep" by Gregory Boyington.  Don't judge this book by the show they made out of it; the book is one heck of an incredible read.   And I've read a lot!

 

Mark

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

The Accidental Airline: Spilsbury's QCA

Paperback – Jan 1 1994

by Howard White (Author), Jim Spilsbury (Author)

 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

One time QCA received a charter for Garibaldi Park. Three young hikers wanted to be taken into Garibaldi Lake with their packs and supplies. The weather report was marginal but Johnny Hatch decided he would try making the flight himself. All went well until he turned out of the valley and headed up toward the end of the lake. The end of the valley is blocked by an eight-hundred-foot-high lava 'dyke' that forms the lake, and he had to fly up over the barrier to land on the water.

Just as Johnny was approaching the barrier, a violent downdraft of cold glacial air hit the aircraft and caused it to lose several hundred feet of altitude. Since it was impossible to clear the barrier, Johnny took the only course left to him. He chopped the throttle, shut off the ignition, and aimed straight for two medium-sized, springy-looking fir trees. The aircraft, now at stall speed, struck the trees forty-five feet above ground, pushed them over to a forty-five degree angle, then slid down the trunks like an elevator and made a reasonably soft landing.

Quite a few things happened to the aircraft during the process. Both wings sheared off. The pontoons doubled back under the fuselage like pretzels and the engine came off its mount. Gasoline was everywhere. When the broken branches and glass and bits of aircraft stopped falling, Johnny looked around to see how his passengers made out. Before he could think what to say, one of them turned from the window and exclaimed, "Oh, isn't this absolutely bee-yootiful!" None of them had ever been in an aircraft before and they had nothing with which to compare this uncommon performance. They seemed to assume that this was just the normal way you landed your floatplane on a mountain.