Good flying fiction?

I've been looking for some good flying stories. A friend recommended "The Reluctant Messiah", which I've yet to find. Can someone recommend more, preferably written by a pilot & for pilots?

"Chris Wells" wrote in message
...

I've been looking for some good flying stories. A friend recommended
"The Reluctant Messiah", which I've yet to find. Can someone recommend
more, preferably written by a pilot & for pilots?




--
Chris Wells

Not exactly fiction, "Fate is the Hunter", by Earnest K. Gann

Good read.

Al G

It's funny, today I found the "Reluctant Messiah" book & read it, then I took out a book by Frank Tallman, "Flying the Old Planes" - and now I see this post, and note that the forward is written by Ernest Gann.

Originally Posted by Al G

"Chris Wells" wrote in message
...

I've been looking for some good flying stories. A friend recommended
"The Reluctant Messiah", which I've yet to find. Can someone recommend
more, preferably written by a pilot & for pilots?




--
Chris Wells

Not exactly fiction, "Fate is the Hunter", by Earnest K. Gann

Good read.

Al G

I carried a copy of ``The High and the Mighty'' crossing most of
the Pacific in company DC-6s in the 60s, but nobody noticed.

As an extremely bored kid stuck in the mountains for summer vacations
I read every book with an airplane in it from the local library. It's
amazing how much crap they put in about social relationships and stuff
that you have to wade through to get to the airplane parts.

(This mountain place had a short unattended airstrip that I'd think
about flying into and out of, ascending the mountains without the
necessity of any work. Years later I flew in and out a few times,
and the mountain part was completely uninteresting, a strange result.)

As a grown-up, I can't reproduce the interest in airplanes necessary
to read this stuff, or rather it changed to an interest in physics
rather than fantasized freedom. The social relationship parts are
still crap.

If you want to get to the meat of the stories, old Flying magazine
stories ``I learned about flying from that'' always had some nugget
of warning. Add girls and a destination and you have a novel for kids,
if they can wade through the girl part.

Example of interest today, a story about a commuter plane that crashed
in Texas year ago now, that turned out to be from stalling the
stabilizer. That's an interesting crash.

--
Ron Hardin


On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.

Biggles!?

;D

The entire title is "Illusions: The Adventures Of A Reluctant Messiah" by
Richard Bach. At one time he wrote a monthly column for a now defunct
magazine and the best of those columns have been collected into a book
called "A Gift Of Wings". Excellent reading.

Google "Richard Bach" and see what pops up. He of late has been
concentrating on kid's books to the exclusion of the aviation stuff.

Met him at Oshkosh a few years ago and got him to autograph my copy of
Illusions. Told him it comforted me through three jobs and two wives and he
seemed to get a kick out of that.

Jim


Al G Wrote:
"Chris Wells" wrote in
message
...-

I've been looking for some good flying stories. A friend recommended
"The Reluctant Messiah", which I've yet to find. Can someone
recommend
more, preferably written by a pilot & for pilots?

RST Engineering writes:

The entire title is "Illusions: The Adventures Of A Reluctant
Messiah" by Richard Bach.


Also good is _Stranger To the Ground_, about the time Bach spent
flying F-84 Thunderstreaks with the Air National Guard. I found
it a much more satisfying read, airplane content-wise, than the
New Agey stuff he wrote later.

What was the now-defunct magazine that Bach once wrote a column
for? Omni?



Geoff

--
"I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration,
communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the
international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all
of our precious bodily fluids!" --Gen. Jack D. Ripper, USAF

Not flying fiction, but the story of Flt Lt Geoffrey Wellum who flew during
the Battle of Britain: "First Light". I couldn't put it down until finished.
Highly recommended.

Gus
Coltishall, UK
"Al G" wrote in message
...

"Chris Wells" wrote in
message ...

I've been looking for some good flying stories. A friend recommended
"The Reluctant Messiah", which I've yet to find. Can someone recommend
more, preferably written by a pilot & for pilots?




--
Chris Wells

Not exactly fiction, "Fate is the Hunter", by Earnest K. Gann

Good read.

Al G

I also thought I'd mention a book called "Flights of Passage", about a Navy bomber pilot in the Pacific during WW2. (sorry, the author's name escapes me at the moment)

Also, "Silent Wings: Adventures in Motorless Flight" - great stuff about gliders, including a lot about their use in WW2...plus "Flight of Passage", about a 17-year-old and a 15-year-old who restored a Piper Cub and flew it across the US & back.

"Chris Wells" wrote in message
...

I recently visited the Niagara Aerospace Museum (thumbs up!) and got the
opportunity to see a P39 Airacobra close-up...and I noticed that the
elevator and ailerons (& possibly the rudder as well) were
fabric-covered, instead of aluminum like the rest of the plane. Is this
the way they were built?


Yes.