For every one of us life is a journey filled with beauty and pitfalls. It was my good fortune to make the journey through avery climactic period in history in a job I loved, blessed with family and friends. Flying revealed the powerful forces of nature and was a great teacher. When the hail rattles off the fuselage, lightning flashes all around, updrafts and downdrafts send you soaring 3 000 feet a minute; focus,keep it an even keel and on course because this to shall pass. So it is in life. Flying as in life, history is important. The same basic procedures for flying through turbulence have not changed over the years. Anticipate, slow down to turbulence speed before penetrating so you enter with a stable attitude and power setting. We learn from predecessors mistakes. The reason for writing this book was to share this rather remarkable journey and give a small personal peek into the turbulent 20th Century.

Understanding the recent social unrest and political developments in Peru requires a thorough understanding of the country's past

From the moment news reached Peru in 1910 that Jorge Chávez Dartnell, a pilot of Peruvian parentage, had become the first man to fly across the Alps, aviation fired the imagination of the masses in his home country. His and other Peruvian pilots' achievements generated great optimism that this technology could lift Peru out of its self-perceived backwardness and transform it into a modern nation. Though poor infrastructure, economic woes, a dearth of technical expertise, and frequent pilot deaths slowed Peru's domestic aviation project, diverse groups saw in airplanes their own visions for Peruvian renewal. In this book, Willie Hiatt shows how politicians, businessmen, and military officials promoted the project as critical to the nation. At the same time, indigenous communities and provincial residents willingly gave up land for airfields, raised money to purchase aircraft for the military, named airplanes after sponsoring civic groups, towns, and regions, and breached police cordons at flying exhibitions to get close-up looks at planes and pilots. By 1928, three commercial lines were transporting passengers and goods from far-flung regions of the Amazon, highlands, and coast to Lima and beyond. Tracing the development of Peruvian aviation from heroic individual feats to essential infrastructure, The Rarified Air of the Modern shows how Peruvians mobilized airplanes to reflect their technological progress, their modern identity, and their nation's intertwining with the history of the West.