This is what Duke and Eddie had to work with in CHASING DRAGONS and THE LAST RAJAH. It’s probably hard for modern pilots to imagine climbing into an aircraft like the Lockheed Lodestar with its primitive navigation capabilities and setting out on a 2,000-mile journey over open ocean for a remote island destination. But thousands of missions were flown just like that.  


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
 The new Lou Rizzo mystery is now available on Amazon here . For fans of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and the noir genre, here is a good old-fashioned, hard-boiled detective yarn. It’s the second installment in the Lou Rizzo detective series. Lou Rizzo is a streetwise private eye who makes a living off philandering spouses. It wasn’t his first career choice but losing an eye while flying a B-25 raid in World War II put an end to his childhood dream of becoming a commercial aviator. It also drove him to depression and the bottle. He’s begun to make peace with his fate, allowing him to take his first small steps on the long journey out of alcoholism. One day a seductive redhead, with danger written all over her, slinks into his office and turns his world upside down. Her request…find the man who murdered her brother. He doesn’t take homicide cases; that’s police business and career suicide for a private dick. He knows better, but the lady is very persuasive…very. Against hi...
Read more
Image
In CHASING DRAGONS ( http://tiny.cc/oy7ply ) and THE LAST RAJAH ( http://tiny.cc/3berly ), co-pilot Edwina "Eddie" Watt is a former WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots). Their mission was to free male pilots for combat roles by employing qualified female pilots to ferry aircraft from factories to military bases and to tow drones and aerial targets. Each WASP candidate already had a pilot's license. They were trained to fly "the Army way" by the U.S. Army Air Forces at Avenger Fie ... ld in Sweetwater, Texas. More than 25,000 women applied for the WASP, and fewer than 1,900 were accepted. After completing four months of military flight training, 1,074 of them earned their wings and became the first women to fly American military aircraft. WASP were stationed at 122 air bases across the U.S., assuming numerous flight-related missions, and relieving male pilots for combat duty. They flew sixty million miles of operational flights from aircraft factories to port...
Read more

Fate is the Hunter by Ernest K.Gann

Image
If you have any interest in commercial aviation and haven't read this book, do yourself a favor and run out and get yourself a copy. This masterpiece of aviation lore is part memoir, part historical journal and part philosophical treatise. The early days of commercial aviation were marred by many fatal accidents. The author's accounts of these disasters are interesting in their own right...we're all fascinated with the why of an accident... but nuts and bolts are not the major theme of this book. That is a larger issue: Why does one pilot survive and another does not? Sure, some accidents can be traced to pilot error, but others seem to be a matter of luck. Pilot A was there, pilot B was not. One survives and one does not. Why? The book postulates that there is no rational answer to this. It is random...fate. This masterful work is both interesting and thought provoking. It is one of my favorites.  Five props!
Read more