Aviation Books Worth and Not Worth Reading

Jonathan Baron

Jonathan Baron

New member
I don't know how many of you consume aviation books like a group of guys eating corn chips and salsa while waiting for their food to arrive at a Mexican restaurant. I'm guilty of both. Thus I'd to start a topic on this.

First off, we all know the masterpieces...Fate is the Hunter, Darkness at Noon (most stuff by Gann), Wager With the Wind, a lot of Richard Bach's books, and anything on aviation by St. Ex. If not, get thee to Amazon or the used books shack at your next major fly-in.

There are other masterpieces that may be less well known. If you have faves, phuleeze post them here.

Now for the real clunkers. There is that whole genre of scare-you-into-reading-this books. Sometimes the author has written a bunch of these things, as well as training books. This means they are repackaging material in different ways to snare you.

I submit for your consideration, The Killing Zone, by Paul Craig. This book is full of fatal accident reports involving people doing very stupid things. If you're low time perhaps it's not all that bad, but most of us has had this stuff hammered into us for sooooo long, that this book isn't even good for bathroom reading. Unless you've felt the urge to take yourself into IMC with icing at night over the Rockies when the ink has not dried on your SEL ticket, don't bother buying this book. If you have felt the urge, and acted on it, you're already dead.

I'm not trying to sound superior at all. I credit not my flying education or judgement for having not considered doing really dumb things. I give all the credit to my being a chicken-sh*t. Plus we lose good friends for doing dumb things every year. Thing is they knew by heart every word contained in books such as this and, inexplicably and sadly, got stuck on tragically stupid anyway. In short, there's nothing new in The Killing Zone.

Your picks and pans?

Jonathan
 
As I re-read my previous post, I noticed that the old writing sin of Ambiguous Reference appeared. No, you will not die from reading The Killing Zone.

BTW, I actually took the faux pilot type test at the end of the book. Each question had three choices: what a jerk would do, what most of us would do, and what a CPA would do, always in the same order. The author referred to the first answer as typifying the classic pilot mentality. So I guess if you're a real jerk, the good news is that you might actually be a classic aviator.

They pick up the trash on Tuesdays here. My copy of The Killing Zone will perish in a landfill.

Jonathan
 
"My Secret War" -Richard Drury ( A-1H pilot in Viet Nam).
"Sagittarius Rising" -C.L. Lewis (WWI and post-war flying).
"Serenade to the Big Bird" -Bert Stiles (WWII, B-17F)
"Thunderbolt" -Robert S. Johnson (P-47)
"To Fly and Fight" - Clarence "Bud" Anderson (P-51)
"I Could Never be so Lucky Again" -James Doolittle (autobiography)
"Baa Baa Black Sheep" - Gregory Boyington (autobiography)
"The Jolly Rogers" -Tommy Blackburn (Story of Vf-17 F4U-1 thru 1D)

Man- I could go on and on, but "My Secret War" is a definite favorite and should be required reading for all aviators.
 
Among the most teary moments I've had in aviation, apart from various instructor's assessment of my pilot skills, was when my aviation father - that Dad many of us had in flying who was no blood relation - handed me an autographed copy of Rickenbacker's biography. After my moist eyed "I...I can't take this," scene, he said, "That's okay. I have another with a more...personal signature."

Yep, he'd known Captain Eddie.

DD - I've read all the books you mention. I pretty much had to, not that I minded AT ALL. This was during the days when I was producing and designing and doing a sh*tlod of things for the online multiplayer computer game (the first one with graphics) called Air Warrior. This was prior to the BIG dev team computer game era. I was close to my customers, and we were all reading so many combat pilot memoirs we could each fill a bathtub with the books we read on the subject.

My favorite was Pierre Closterman's The Big Show. He was a refugee from France who flew with the RAF during WWII and died only a year or two ago at age one hundred and something.

The most moving passage from his book I'll quote here. To set this up, most folks today have no notion of how many combat pilots viewed their counterparts on the other side.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Walter Nowotny was dead. Our adversary in Normandy and in the German skies had died two days before in the hospital at Osnabruck as a result of burns. The Luftwaffe, whose hero he was, would not long survive his death, which was as it were the turning point of the aerial war. That evening in the mess his name was often on our lips. We spoke of him without hatred and without rancour. Each one of us recalled his memories of him, with respect, almost with affection. It was the first time I had heard this note in a conversation in the R.A.F., and it was also the first time I heard, openly expressed, that curious solidarity among fighter pilots which is above all tragedies and all prejudices.

This war had witnessed appalling massacres, towns crushed by bombs, the butchery of Oradour, the ruins of Hamburg. We ourselves had been sickened when our shells exploded in a peaceful village street, mowing down women and children round the German tank we were attacking. In comparison our tussels with Nowotny and his Messerschmitts were something clean, above the fighting on the ground, in the mud and the blood, in the deafening din of the crawling, stinking tanks.

Dog-fights in the sky: silvery midges dancing in graceful arabesques - the diaphanous tracery of milky condensation trails - Focke-Wulfs skimming like toys in the infinite sky. We too, of course, were involved in less noble fighting: that strafing of trains in the grey dawn of winter mornings when you tried not to think of the shrieks of terror, not to see your shells smashing through wood, the windows shivering in fragments, the engine-drivers writhing in the burning jets of steam, all those human beings trapped in the coaches, panic-sticken by the roar of our engines, and the barking of the flak; all those inhuman, immoral jobs we had to do because we were soldiers and because war is war. We could rise above all this to-day by saluting a brave enemy who had just died, by saying that Nowotny belonged to us, that he was part of our world where there were no ideologies, no hatred and no frontiers. This sense of comradeship had nothing to do with patriotism, democracy, Nazism or humanity. All those chaps that evening felt this instinctively, and as for those who shrug their shoulders, they just can't know - they aren't fighter pilots.

The conversation had ceased, the beer mugs were empty, the wireless was silent as it was past midnight. Bruce Cole, who was neither poet nor philosopher, let fall these words:

"Whoever first dared paint markings on a plane's wing was a swine!"
-----------------------------------------------------------

Jonathan
 
Ever hear of a series called "The Seventh Carrier"? Basically the "seventh" Pearl Harbor IJN carrier got trapped in an ice cave until 1990 or so. All the sailors were old but hadn't aged much due to an excellent diet of fresh fish apparently.
The world goes to war, but the Chinese have some sort of disruptor ray that keeps jet and rocket engines from working. For some reason, recip engines still work. The "Seventh Carrier" has a fully operational carrier wing and whoops some butt along with the Americans who have all these restored WWII types. The adversaries have some restore WWII types as well. Mayhem ensues (yawn).
 
I can't say that the following were great literature, but I sure enjoyed reading them.
Have you read Piece of Cake by Derek Robinson? PBS made it into a series on Masterpiece Theater. They used Spitfires for TV, but the book had Hurricanes. Bridges at Toko-Ri by Michener was interesting, if not depressing. Another interesting book is Kohn's War by Fredrick Arnold (P38s in the Med). It was also published as Doorknob Five Two. I got to meet Fredrick Arnold at the Watsonville Airshow one year. He was very interesting to talk to.
The Man who Rode the Thunder by William Rankin, Lt. Col, USMC about an F8 pilot who ejected into a thunderstorm at FL500 and landed 40 minutes later. If you like F8's also read The Brink by Richard Setlowe. Takes place in the Straits of Formosa in 1958 (for you other ancients that was around the time the PRC was bombarding Quemoy and Matsu.
Other interesting/enjoyable authors were Martin Caidin and Wolfgang Langewiesche.
 
Robinson's work is quite literary, IMO, Larry. Goshawk Squadron is another gem of his, set in WWI. He's not an email guy so we exchanged letters.

Nowadays folks have problems understanding such correspondence. I have to explain it a bit. "You write stuff on paper, fold it, put it into a folded paper container, slap these things called stamps on it, slide it into a steel container and wait a long, long time" :)

He's ex-RAF but his point had nothing to do with aviation, per se. Rather he was exploring the fact that everyone - EVERYONE - has a breaking point, even guys like Moggy. He writes very witty letters but he's a Brit after all.

DD:

In fact I have never been able to throw away a book. Send me your real life address and I'll be happy to send The Killing Zone to you. The book is not as bad as I let on. Sometimes I simply have fun with things that sound soooooo serious :wink:

All:

Thank you for adding to my reading list!

Jonathan
 
This is not a specific book, but decided to tack it on to this thread anyway:

Flew down to Poughkeepsie today to meet with Cpt. John Miller, who had quite a few articles in Vintage Airplane magazine about Golden Age flying. He also has a book, but didn't get the info - sorry. He was driven to the field by his daughter who is 72.

Cpt. John is 102; graduated from Pratt Institute in 1927 (had already been flying since 1923) and took the train out to watch Lindbergh depart. His comment: "We'll never see that poor chap again."

He was self-taught in a Canuck (Canadian-built JN4), took his first (paying) passenger on his third solo, then rebuilt the Jenny and barnstormed around the area. Much more....

Jon Estis tried to get him in the air in his Franklin-powered Bellanca Champ, but his knees hurt too bad to get in.

As I remember, his articles were quite interesting and worth looking up. Sorry for the drawn-out story.
 
Heck, Robert, you read my posts and say *yours* is drawn out? :) :)

I would have loved to have met him. As I recall he did a lot of autogyro flying in its heyday...along with all sorts of things. EAA has been putting together an oral history project for the past few years so we'll have detailed interviews of many of the living aviation pioneers who will probably not be with us much longer, alas.

Jonathan
 
Jonathan:

my e-mail is cruisair "at" hotmail.com.
Shoot me a line and I'll send my address!

TIA,
 
Yes, getting old is killing me. A great book that my friends and I from the Air Force have ( WE WERE F-106 weenies) "Century Jets" by David Donald. Everything you ever wanted to know about F-100,101, 104,105 and 106. If you love these planes this is THE BOOK! Lynn 8) 8)
 
Wow, what a baggage of litterature!
Well, I"ve read Snoopy with Charlie Brown! does that count?
:)
A.
 
Regarding the aforementioned Derick Robinson (Goshawk Squadron, Piece of Cake), I found this on the NPR web site. Having read some of his work, Larry, I think you'll find this interesting :)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14346307

Jonathan
 
THANKS Jonathan. That was great!

While I am at it, another interesting book I read a zillion years ago was "Bullseye One" by Dan McKinnon. It is about the 1981 Israeli Air Force strike on Iraq's nuclear reactor. It was the most detailed, unemotional recounting of what went happened, before, during and after the strike that I have seen/read.
I just pulled it down, and noticed it had a forward by Randy Cunningham. Regardless, it is still an interesting book.
 
Many of us, including me, idolized Duke Cunningham and for good reason. His dogfight with Col. Tomb is perhaps the finest example of the perfect dogfight where each aircraft's strengths and weaknesses were utterly employed. However, as Robinson's books assert, being able in combat does not necessarily mean you're a hero, and it certainly doesn't mean you're an admirable person. Cunningham's case certainly proves the point, alas.

Jonathan
 
As Gregory "Pappy" Boyington one said: "Show me a hero and I'll show you a bum."

It was found there was never a "Colonel Tooms" in the NVR or any other adversarial air force.
That Cunningham fought a highly-experienced pilot is without dispute. The pilot is still unknown. Best guess is he (or she?) was a Soviet.
 
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