Investigations into the causes of aircraft accidents have for decades focused on what happened and who did it -- very rarely Why? It is the question Why? that David Beaty has addressed here, fighting the misnomer of 'pilot error' and propounding that the cause should be sought deeper inside human beings who make apparently simple human errors. The Naked Pilot makes fascinating and compulsive reading. It should be compulsory reading for all trainee and experienced pilots alike, as well as air traffic controllers, corporate managers and aircraft manufacturers. -- Business Aviation
Have you ever wanted to take off, climb, and cruise on a sixty-two-year-old, rebuilt Messerschmitt 208 (Nord 1101)? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be the only Scotsman to crash a Messerschmitt on the famous Battle of Britain airfield in North Weald? Read about my home-made, cardboard simulator and my experience learning to fly an old aeroplane on the sofa. And also read about making films such as First Aerial Voyage in Scotland, Vincenzo Lunardi 1786 by strapping a camera to the floor of the cockpit. Find out about the shed in Skelmorlie, which is like the shed in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where the naked pilots Wilbur and Orville Wright worked. There, the wind was steady and strong. It was a bit like deciding to go out on the machair in Islay and putting up a frail, wooden shed that had been transported to the island by a Clyde puffer. Come on a journey with Amy Johnson, Saint-Exupry, and Bill Burns. And then come back to earth. You have to ride a Velocette LE motorcycle with the same power in its engine as the Pope Toledo in the Wright brothers first powered aeroplane! On the ferry back to Sandpoint the LE Velo wont start on the handstart but once the ferry is empty I can run and jump and push the bike into life and burble through the gloaming in the best Brigadoon style. I push the Velocette straight into the shed among the aeroplane parts is there any Bowmore left?
Michael Bleriot is a U.S. Air Force pilot who flew the C-27 aircraft in Central and South America. His stories are about tactical airlift, what it's like to fly people and things into and out of remote locations. Flying Naked is about flying low and flying slow.
The first full cultural history of the ultimate modern structure: the airport, revealed as never before ... Since its origins in the muddy fields of flying machines, the airport has arguably become one of the defining institutions of modern life. In Naked Airport, critic Alastair Gordon ranges from global geopolitics to action movies to the daily commute, showing how airports have changed our sense of time, distance, travel, style, and even the way cities are built and business is done. Gordon introduces the people who shaped this place of sudden transportation: pilots like Charles Lindberg, architects like Eero Saarinen, politicians like Fiorello La Guardia, and Hitler, who built Berlin's Tempelhof as a showcase for Fascist power. He describes the airport's futuristic contributions, such as credit cards, in the form of fly-now-pay-later schemes, and he charts its shift in popular perception, from glamorous to infuriating. Finally, he analyzes the airport's function in war and peace—its gatekeeper role controlling immigration, its appeal to revolutionaries since the hijackings of the 1960s, and its new frontline position in the struggle against terror. Compelling and accessible, Naked Airport is an original history of a long-neglected yet central creation of modern reality and imagination.
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.
During the early years of the Vietnam War, several small cadres of men served their country and their fellow comrades-in-arms from a remote airbase cut out of the jungles of northeast Thailand. The base was named Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base, but the men assigned there had a special name for it: "Naked Fanny." Initially they were assigned to rescue military pilots shot down over Laos or forced to leave their aircraft over Thailand. But as the war expanded, their mission changed and they were asked to fly into hostile situations in North Vietnam, making numerous rescues--detailed here by the pilots who flew them and those who were rescued. This is a story that has never been told in its entirety but is an integral part of U.S. Air Force aviation history. Scott Harrington has compiled and written the story of those early years of the Vietnam War at the little base just west of the town of Nakhon Phanom, Thailand. After reading it, you'll understand why these fragile aircraft and the men who flew them were often referred to as "Blades of wood - Men of steel."
