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.

From the award-winning author of American Canopy, a dazzling account of the world’s longest road, the Pan-American Highway, and the epic quest to link North and South America, a dramatic story of commerce, technology, politics, and the divergent fates of the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Pan-American Highway, monument to a century’s worth of diplomacy and investment, education and engineering, scandal and sweat, is the longest road in the world, passable everywhere save the mythic Darien Gap that straddles Panama and Colombia. The highway’s history, however, has long remained a mystery, a story scattered among government archives, private papers, and fading memories. In contrast to the Panama Canal and its vast literature, the Pan-American Highway—the United States’ other great twentieth-century hemispheric infrastructure project—has become an orphan of the past, effectively erased from the story of the “American Century.” The Longest Line on the Map uncovers this incredible tale for the first time and weaves it into a tapestry that fascinates, informs, and delights. Rutkow’s narrative forces the reader to take seriously the question: Why couldn’t the Americas have become a single region that “is” and not two near irreconcilable halves that “are”? Whether you’re fascinated by the history of the Americas, or you’ve dreamed of driving around the globe, or you simply love world records and the stories behind them, The Longest Line on the Map is a riveting narrative, a lost epic of hemispheric scale.

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.