This is my storythe story of a pilot who flew airplanes for some thirty-seven years: ten years in the United States Air Force, primarily in jet fighters, and then twenty-seven years flying commercial jet airliners. I was inspired to write this story after reading the autobiography, a few years ago, of Gen. Chuck Yeagerhe being the world-renowned test pilot, World War II fighter ace, and first man to break the sound barrier in the Bell X-1. My story is the story of an average pilot, an average guy who survived several close calls, had many interesting experiences along the way, and often wondered, Am I still here because I was especially good or because I was especially lucky? I think the answer is definitely a combination of the two, just as Yeager says or implies in his book. With him, it may have been a larger contribution of skill, but as he said, The secret of my success is that I always managed to live to fly another day. I have to echo that comment. While flying around the country with American Airlines, during hours of complete boredom (as we say), we pilots often traded our war stories of our flying (and other) experiences. I often thought that I had many tales that were similar to some of Yeagers and that I should put my experiences down on paper, even if it would only be my family who might read it. So this, then, is my story, my life, primarily, as it revolved around my aviating experiences over some thirty-seven years, from the viewpoint of a pilot who has no particular claim to fame but who has survived to fly another day. One of the best descriptions of a flying career says: You start out with a big bag of luck and an empty bag of experience; you want to fill the bag of experience before you empty the bag of luck! I guess I have done that.

This is a remarkable book. It is the real life story of a pilot of the famed 91st Bomb Group, the Memphis Belle Group, in World War II, and the missions flown in that Group by the author and his comrades. It follows him from the time his B-17 was shot down over the German-French border, he was rescued and hidden by villagers in the tiny village of Baslieuse, then escaped through a Europe occupied by Nazi forces desperate to escape pursuing Allied armies. The book chronicles, in fascinating detail, the life and training of those young men who made up the heroic 8th Air Force, and describes the affectionate relationship often maintained by their crews with that most famed heavy bomber of all time, the fabled B-17. It includes some of the most tragic stories as well as some of the wryest humor ever written about combat groups. A heavy bomb group consists of 36 heavy bombers. The 91st lost 207 planes during its WWII combat time—32 during the author''s flight tenure. Dr. Anderson uses the words of the extraordinary crews of those planes to describe the training they absorbed, the missions they flew, the results they achieved, the tragedy of watching their planes explode and their friends die, and the heroism that brought so many near fatally damaged planes home with their dead and wounded crews. This is also a story of growing up in pre-war America, and of the growth and development of that sturdy character which enabled these young men and their children and grandchildren to help create today''s world. God bless them, their achievements, and what their heroism made possible so that we could live in the world we do today.

Flying a B-17 Flying Fortress with the Fifteenth Air Force out of Foggia, Italy, Lt. George H. Neilson describes the harrowing experiences of his twenty-eight combat missions as well as the ups and downs of life in the US Army Air Corps from enlistment to discharge (194345). Blending selections of his fathers letters to home and memoirs he recorded a half century later with documented background history, the younger Neilson tells the saga of the son of a Boston widow as he confronts the rigors of pilot-officer training and combat service in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations during the final six months of World War II in Europe. George depicts the humorous and mundane sides of army life as well as the terror-filled moments during bomb runs over targets in Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Austria as antiaircraft flak bursts battered the aircraft. Neilsons daily chronicles juxtapose moments when life and death hung in the balance, such as when he landed his crippled Fort in the Adriatic Sea, with the unexpected moments of splendor, such as when he dined in luxury on the Isle of Capri at a castle owned by the royal family of Italy. Flying in formation through clouds so thick that the plane thirty feet off his wing was invisible, George received the Distinguished Flying Cross for his ability as a skilled instrument pilot. He recounts youthful escapades on duty-free hours and the tales of life in Foggias mud-bound tent city in the spur of Italy. It includes the stirring story of his visit to a field hospital where his brother, a captain in the infantry, was recovering from a bullet wound incurred in the fighting in the Apennine Mountain campaign. Finally, the story tells of World War IIs fiery end and how he unknowingly worked on the secret research project to develop the atomic bomb in a lab at MIT before enlistment. For the student of history and aviation and its role in the Allied victory over Hitlers nefarious Reich, this microhistory will not disappoint.

A family-authorised biography of Pat Hughes, one of the top-scoring aces of the Battle of Britain.

The riveting story behind an exceptional test pilot, George Errington, whose career spanned three decades.