I Love Planes!


Book Description

Some carry people around the world. Some land on water. Some can loop around the sky. What does your favorite plane do? Blast off into the world of biplanes and gliders, seaplanes and dive bombers, and find out the special jobs of every kind of plane.




In the Cockpit with Cliff Robertson


Book Description

In the Cockpit with Cliff Robertson is the third volume in the Passion for Flight series. These short biographies (20,000 words or less) tell the stories of notable pilots who inspire young and old alike to take to the skies. Cliff Robertson appeared in more than one hundred roles in his career as an actor, including a young John F. Kennedy in "PT 109," his Academy Award winning performance in "Charly," astronaut Buzz Aldrin in the autobiographic "Return to Earth," Henry Ford in "The Man and the Machine," and most recently, Uncle Ben from "Spider-Man." Cliff always felt more comfortable in a plane than in Hollywood. His fascination for aviation began as a child. He accrued several thousand hours in the cockpit and held single-engine land and sea, multiengine, instrument and commercial licenses, as well as balloon, gliding and seaplane ratings. Over his lifetime he owned a variety of planes, including a Beech Baron 58, Messerschmitt Me 108, Stampe SV4, three Tiger Moths and a Spitfire Mk.IX. He gave others the opportunity he had as a youth when he became involved with the Experimental Aircraft Association. Within EAA, he founded the Cliff Robertson Work Experience, helped launch EAA's Young Eagles program in 1992, and served as its first national honorary chairman. At EAA AirVenture 2002, he was presented with the inaugural Key to the City Award, created by EAA and the city of Oshkosh, to honor distinguished personalities for significant contributions to the promotion and support of EAA AirVenture Oshkosh and the aviation community. Di Freeze interviewed the Emmy and Academy Award winning actor for this short biography prior to his death. He reviewed and approved this approximately 5,000-word bio. This is not meant to be a comprehensive history of Cliff Robertson's life, but it contains the major milestones in his acting career and aviation history.




Zen Pilot


Book Description

"I was rocketing toward the ground in an aircraft loaded with high-octane aviation fuel. All I could do was negotiate where the impact would happen."Robert DeLaurentis had an impossibly big dream: to circumnavigate the globe in a single-engine piston plane. Meant to be the ultimate test of his flying skills as a pilot,the journey would take him to the ends of the earth and over some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet.He diligently prepared himself and his plane, the "Spirit of San Diego," for the excursion. Having previously flown to far-off places, he thought he knew what to expect.But reality doesn't always make for the best co-pilot.What began as a call to adventure turned into a soul-defining mission riddled with equipment failure, fierce weather, foreign bureaucratic nightmares, and nearly ended in a crash into the vast Pacific Ocean. The voyage would stretch his limits, test his mental strength, and eventually define him. Beaten down, broken and discouraged, he found that the only way to survive was to surrender to the Universe. In this follow-up to Flying Thru Life, DeLaurentis shares the insights he gained for overcoming paralyzing fear, defeating obstacles, and confronting any situation with grace and ease.This raw, at times terrifying, real-life adventure will inspire anyone who loves flying, yearns to fly, or simply has their own "impossibly big dream."DeLaurentis' extraordinary journey shows us what it takes to be a Zen Pilot.




Skyfaring


Book Description

A poetic and nuanced exploration of the human experience of flight that reminds us of the full imaginative weight of our most ordinary journeys—and reawakens our capacity to be amazed. The twenty-first century has relegated airplane flight—a once remarkable feat of human ingenuity—to the realm of the mundane. Mark Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot who left academia and a career in the business world to pursue his childhood dream of flight, asks us to reimagine what we—both as pilots and as passengers—are actually doing when we enter the world between departure and discovery. In a seamless fusion of history, politics, geography, meteorology, ecology, family, and physics, Vanhoenacker vaults across geographical and cultural boundaries; above mountains, oceans, and deserts; through snow, wind, and rain, renewing a simultaneously humbling and almost superhuman activity that affords us unparalleled perspectives on the planet we inhabit and the communities we form.




Passion for Flight


Book Description

Passion For Flight is an account of the outstanding flying careers of some of our most brilliant aviators whose achievements have helped place South Africa among the top achievers in world aviation. The stories take one back to the early days when flights over Africa posed immense dangers - uncharted, hostile territory, primitive instruments and no radio, with unreliable weather forecasts Then the stories of highly decorated pilots who were trained and fought in the RAF. These stalwarts have many attributes in common during their years in the limelight. One of these was modesty.




QF32


Book Description

QF32 is the award winning bestseller from Richard de Crespigny, author of the forthcoming Fly!: Life Lessons from the Cockpit of QF32 On 4 November 2010, a flight from Singapore to Sydney came within a knife edge of being one of the world's worst air disasters. Shortly after leaving Changi Airport, an explosion shattered Engine 2 of Qantas flight QF32 - an Airbus A380, the largest and most advanced passenger plane ever built. Hundreds of pieces of shrapnel ripped through the wing and fuselage, creating chaos as vital flight systems and back-ups were destroyed or degraded. In other hands, the plane might have been lost with all 469 people on board, but a supremely experienced flight crew, led by Captain Richard de Crespigny, managed to land the crippled aircraft and safely disembark the passengers after hours of nerve-racking effort. Tracing Richard's life and career up until that fateful flight, QF32 shows exactly what goes into the making of a top-level airline pilot, and the extraordinary skills and training needed to keep us safe in the air. Fascinating in its detail and vividly compelling in its narrative, QF32 is the riveting, blow-by-blow story of just what happens when things go badly wrong in the air, told by the captain himself. Winner of ABIA Awards for Best General Non-fiction Book of the Year 2013 and Indie Awards' Best Non-fiction 2012 Shortlisted ABIA Awards' Book of the Year 2013




A Passion for Wings


Book Description

A prize-winning historian offers an exhilarating book--the first cultural history of the pioneering phase of aviation--which tells the stories of the artists, writers, and intellectuals whose imaginations were captured by the power of flight. Over 300 illustrations, some in color.




A Passion for Flying


Book Description

The story of Group Captain Tom Eeles who served in the RAF for 44 years and totaled over 8000 hours of flying in twenty-eight different aircraft types. Tom entered RAF College Cranwell in 1961, he gained his RAF wings in 1963.




Passion


Book Description

After decades out of print, Passion—one of June Jordan’s most important collections—has returned to readers. Originally entitled, passion: new poems, 1977-1980, this volume holds key works including “Poem About My Rights,” “Poem About Police Violence,” “Free Flight,” and an essay by the poet, “For the Sake of the People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.” June Jordan was a fierce advocate for the safety and humanity of women and Black people, and for the freedom of all people—and Barack Obama made a line from this book famous: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” With love and humor, via lyrics and rants, she calls for nothing less than radical compassion. This new edition includes a foreword by Nicole Sealey.




In the Cockpit with Barron Hilton


Book Description

It's not often that someone can, in a three-day period, fly in two antique aircraft, an aerobatic plane, two gliders and a helicopter. However, in 2003, I did just that, when I visited Barron Hilton's Flying M Ranch in northern Nevada. A beautiful Staggerwing was my taxi from Reno/Tahoe International to the famed ranch. Our "escort" was a gorgeous Stearman. That afternoon, Hannes Linke, competition director for the Barron Hilton Cup, would be my pilot for a breathtaking two-hour flight in a Duo Discus. Mike also treated me to an IMAX-type tour of Hilton's vast property in the Stearman. On my final day at the ranch, I had planned on going back to Reno/Tahoe shortly after breakfast, but took up the offer of guest Clay Lacy to ride with him in his Lear 25 back to his FBO at Van Nuys Airport., before heading back to Denver. That gave me a few more hours to watch the launch of another hot air balloon flight, and to sneak in a flight in Hilton's Citabria Decathlon with Dennis Ivans. It's been a decade since I flew through the skies over the Flying M Ranch, dubbing it "Disneyland for Aviators." Since then, several of Barron's closest friends made their last visits to this wonderland before Flying West. He said goodbye to Cliff Robertson; Carroll Shelby; John W. Myers, who happened to be visiting the ranch the weekend I was a guest; and Steve Fossett, who spent his last hours before his disappearance at his friend's ranch. Other losses have occured in Barron's life, including the loss of his wife, Marilyn. Instead of trying to update this biography to reflect those changes, I have chosen to present the Flying M Ranch exactly as it was on the idyllic weekend I was there as a guest of one of the world's most loved and well known "innkeepers."