Recommend some books on post-WW2 military aviation

Cafe Society
21

Several of those, I think Flight of the Old Dog was the first.

I’m one of those who thinks real stories are far more interesting than fiction, though. Especially formulaic fiction.

22

That’s the one I was thinking of.

23

Well after you’ve finished something like ‘The Holocaust’ by Martin Gilbert (cross-thread alert) a straight-forward fun bubble-gum action novel is just what you need.

And reading something like the novel I mentioned earlier, ‘Firebreak’, which depicts a future war in the Middle East from the perspective of someone writing in 1991 just after the First Gulf war gives an interesting new twist on things.

I have to say that its a fun book, the author is very fair with competent and likable and unpleasant and dislikable characters from all sides.

24

How about the memoir of one of the first female combat pilots and her experience aboard a carrier.

She’s Just Another Navy Pilot: An Aviator’s Sea Journal by Loree Draude Hirschman

25

Hmm. You might also try * Rogue Hercules * by Dennis Pitt which is about mercenary gun runners flying a C 130 Hercules in Africa in conflict with Soviet fighter advisors

26

Thanks, I’ll check those two out!

27

Loved that book. My three favorite bits from it:

  • The flight instructor who loved to frighten trainees. Once he flew along railroad tracks just a few feet above the ground, the wires on nearby telephone poles above the rotors. The trainees begged him to pull up. Instead, he stayed low and went even faster.

  • The flight instructors had a button they could hit to cut power to the helicopter’s engine at any time, and often did so, so that trainees got used to having to be constantly aware of their surroundings, with some flat area nearby in mind, ready for an emergency autorotation (unpowered landing on the momentum of the rotors alone) at any time.

  • The author joked that, given the sketchiness of their navigational training, IFR stood for “I follow railroads,” and VFR stood for “Visually follow railroads.”

28

Ben Rich’s Skunk Works is a very interesting account of the design of the U-2 and SR-71 among other things up through the F-117.