[mairdie]

I was fascinated, as a kid, by the World War I pilot stories that were on TV at 4pm after school ended. Jack’s stories are put just a few years after the war ended, but the pilots seemed to go into this to maintain that old adrenaline rush. Jack makes me picture things – like the pilot who couldn’t get out of his cockpit because the blizzard had snowed him into it. And he teaches me things I never thought about, like the pilot diagnosing the condition of his plane by the sounds of the wire harmonics. Sadly, when you look up these dare-devil friends, they almost all end up “going west,” as they put it.

[mairdie]

PING to Jack Bell story about first airmail pilots

[Billthedrill]

For FReepers who like this sort of thing I'd strongly recommend Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. These were guys who flew mail through the Andes. In other words, crazy people...

[rlmorel]

One of my favorite pictures from those early days...

One of the best aviation books I have read is The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight about Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, and Charles Lindbergh. There is much discussion about the danger of the early airmail days, the short life expectancy of the pilots, and the idiotic handling of airmail contracts by the Roosevelt administration.

[Army Air Corps]

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