My passion for flying old aeroplanes led me to the pilots who flew them in history, and my particular fascination is with the interwar period and the ‘Golden Age of Aviation’, which saw the establishment of the early commercial air routes and the historic solo flights by pilots flying basic machines and pushing themselves and their aircraft to the very limits of endurance to prove that it could be done. I was absolutely mesmerised by the stories of their bravery and obsession. My recommended books all share the theme of pioneering aviation as this has been a consuming interest for much of my adult life, both in and out of the cockpit.
First published in 1961, this memoir may be the best book ever written about aviation by someone who was both a pilot and a terrific writer.
I took the liberty of using this title as the heading for one of the chapters in my own book as a tribute to Gann. His visceral accounts of flying the early airliners in America during the 1930s in the burgeoning years of commercial aviation are literally heart-stopping.
We take so much for granted in this modern age of airline flying but this wonderful book will forever change your perspective of the risks and challenges that went before.
Ernest K. Gann’s classic pilot's memoir is an up-close and thrilling account of the treacherous early days of commercial aviation. “Few writers have ever drawn readers so intimately into the shielded sanctum of the cockpit, and it is hear that Mr. Gann is truly the artist” (The New York Times Book Review).
“A splendid and many-faceted personal memoir that is not only one man’s story but the story, in essence, of all men who fly” (Chicago Tribune). In his inimitable style, Gann brings you right into the cockpit, recounting both the triumphs and terrors of pilots who flew when flying…
Originally released in 1967, a new edition of this book was published by Daredevil in 2021.
Amy Johnson’s story has great personal resonance for me and I was very honoured to write a preface for the book. With less than a hundred hours in her logbook, Amy set out to Australia to break the world record for the fastest time in 1930 and what would become one of the most outstanding solo achievements in history.
My own flight to Australia in 2015/16 re-tracing Amy’s route was done in homage.
Amy Johnson became a household name after her solo flight to Australia in 1930 which thrust her, ill-prepared and exhausted, into the limelight and almost constant media attention for the rest of her short life. She was to die in mysterious circumstances in 1941 crashing into the sea off Herne Bay. Lauded at the time as 'Amy, wonderful Amy', her achievements have captivated us ever since.
Constance Babington Smith was given access to all of Amy Johnson's private papers by the Johnson family and asked to write a posthumous account of the life of this most enigmatic heroine. Babington Smith's…
Me and The Times offers a fresh perspective on those pre-internet days when the Sunday sections of The New York Times shaped the country’s political and cultural conversation. Starting in 1967, Robert Stock edited seven of those sections over 30 years, innovating and troublemaking all the way.
This is about one of our most brilliant female aviators.
Largely forgotten today, the Irish Lady Heath, one of our first female Olympians and the first woman in Britain to hold a commercial pilot’s licence, was also the first person to fly solo from Cape Town to England in 1928.
Her flight was the inspiration for my first expedition up Africa in 2013, about which we made a documentary screened by the BBC, and this book is the moving story of Mary Heath’s exceptional but ultimately tragic life.
I loved reading about these very early pioneers who today are largely forgotten or never known, notably Frank McLean, who met the Wright brothers, and went on to cut an irresistibly romantic, dare-devil figure.
He became an overnight celebrity when he flew a flimsy seaplane between the towers of Tower Bridge in London in 1912. After the First World War, he was one of the first pilots flying to Africa and down the Nile in what would become one of the early air routes for Imperial Airways in the 1930s.
Also, Charles Rolls, of Rolls-Royce fame, who was tragically killed in a freak incident at the Bournemouth air display in 1910, the first Brit to be killed in a flying accident.
It is 1948 in Berlin. The economy is broken, the currency worthless, and the Russian bear is preparing to swallow its next victim. In the ruins of Hitler's capital, former RAF officers and a woman pilot start an air ambulance company that offers a glimmer of hope. Yet when a…
This is a lively history of the first 200 years of British women in the sky.
Given that women were largely blocked by a hostile male establishment from participating in commercial and military aviation for most of the 20th century, this is a riveting account of the unconventional women who defied gravity and everything else to get airborne. Marvellous stuff!
Just eighteen months after two Frenchmen made the world's first ever flight, a fearless British woman hopped into a flimsy balloon and flew across the London sky for nearly an hour. Since then, many other remarkable British women have decided to defy traditional society and follow their dreams to get into the sky. Magnificent Women and Flying Machines tells the stories of the pioneers who achieved real firsts in various forms of aviation: in ballooning, parachuting, gliding, airships and fixed-wing flight - right up to a trip to the International Space Station! Full of entertaining adventure mixed with a wealth…
Tracey
Curtis-Taylor is renowned as one of Britain’s foremost female
adventurers – but she had to fight against the odds to make her dreams
come true. Paying homage to two historic aviators, Curtis-Taylor made
headlines all over the world with three epic flights in a 1942 Boeing
Stearman biplane, from Cape Town to Goodwood, Farnborough to Australia,
and across the USA.
With searing honesty and breathtaking detail, Bird tells the remarkable
story of how she overcame extreme adversity to complete her
three remarkable journeys, also featured in a forthcoming global
film. From cheating death twice and saving her crew from a
firing squad to overcoming a bitter campaign waged by a male-dominated
aviation industry; from her relationship with a mysterious French spy to
the shocking secret that drove her family apart.
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
An enthralling portrait of the Bloomsbury Group’s key figures told through a rich collection of intimate photographs. Photography framed the world of the Bloomsbury Group. The thousands of photographs surviving in albums kept by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey, among others, today offer us a private…
