PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Good aircraft books- what are you reading?
Old 7th Jun 2008, 18:58
  #83 (permalink)  
Fantome
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: THE BLUEBIRD CAFE
Posts: 59
Likes: 0
Received 1 Like on 1 Post
Ginger Lacey, Fighter Pilot by Richard Townshend Bickers, a good companion to the RS Tuck book. Funniest bit in it is what Lacey does to a drunken American pilot in India who is slagging off about the "goddam Limeys, getting us into this friggin' war".

Flying Doctor by Clyde Fenton is a brilliant first hand account. Clyde was the pilot and the doctor at Katherine 1935-1939. Also has fall off the perch bits of a kind unique to the perverse personality of the late Dr Fenton.

Beyond the Blue Horizon by Alexander Frater tells the story of Frater's journey retracing the original Imperial Airways/Qantas route from England to Australia.
When he gets to Darwin he meets Ossie Osgood, Arnhem Air Charter. Ossie tells him how every pilot he employs must be a willing reader of the aviation classics, or "he's no use to me, mate."

Every pilot aspiring or qualified or anyone with the tiniest poetic bone in their body and a feeling for flight has to know Wind Sand and Stars, Antoine de St Exupery. Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis and Autobiography of Values are fine accounts of an extraordinary life. As are his wife's books about their long flights together exploring long haul routes for Pan Am. Listen the Wind is one of those.

Then there's those two brilliant bios by Ian Mackersey on the lives of Charles Kingsford Smith and Jean Batten (Smithy and Jean Batten Garbo of the Skies.)
Fantome is offline