Customer Reviews

First Air: A Novel of Air Combat in the Persian Gulf

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A counterfactual techno-thriller written by a reporter, one of whose heros is... a reporter who is respected and admired by military men. And once you get past *that* particular howler there are plenty more.

Skinner is a writer of good, dry books about military hardware who is in way over his head with this international thriller fantasy. His characters are flat and unintersting, and his dialogue stilted and uninspired. And his narrative style makes Tom Clancy read like Truman Capote. Skinner suffers from a chormic shortage of adjectives. His main characters are always described as grinning and smiling, for some reason: p. 94: "Not me", Brick smiled. p. 95: "Brick smiled, despite himself." p. 99: "Brick smiled". p. 100: "Bobby grinned, despite himself". The overall effect is that of a room full of grinning half-wits.

Given that it's out of print as of this writing, chances are you won't come across this turkey in a bookstore. But if you're tempted to pick it up out of someone's discards, like I did... save yourself the trouble.

Fighter pilots from around the world, the best in each of their respective countries, are sent with their planes to shore up a middle estern country facing a soviet-backed invasion in "First Air". When Bagdad gets nuked, things are bad enough. When an inept Admiral (I guess the author was in the Air Force; like Dale Brown who navigated B-52's for SAC, Skinner's naval officers, fighter-drivers aside, are unsurprisingly dim) accidentally sinks a Russian cruiser (that supposed to be a warning shot!), a Russian reprisal further thins out the western presence in the Persian Gulf area. A shady civilian analyst convinces different countries' air forces to lend both planes and aircrews, forging a hybrid force that contains American F-15's, German Tornadoes and, forgetting that we're in a middle eastern country, Israeli fighters as well. Leading the pack is Bobby Dragon, a mythic fighter pilot last seen flying Phantoms in Vietnam. Having spent the years since the war flying black jets out of Dreamland, Dragon is the obvious choice to send in. On the other side, an obviously evil Russian ace with a vendetta against Dragon (facially disfigured after narrowly losing a dogfight against Dragon over Vietnam) engineers an ethnic uprising in Baluchistan that triggers the war. With his MiG-29 fighters, he more than matches the firepower arrayed against him.

This was a horrible book - the author spends so much time and crams in so many obscure and unnecessary details about military aviation, and wastes so much effort trying to convince his readers about what he knows that his writing never comes close to convincingly detail what it must be like to sit inside of a monster jet fighter. Instead of concentrating on one of the characters, the narrative meanders between different fliers - the mythic Dragon, the "Weasel Twins" (a pair of electronics geniuses who appear to be the Steve Jobbs and Steve Wozniak of the military aviation community), the aged aircrew of a grizzled F-4 Phantom (they refused to transition to the "hated F-16") and a younger American who's determined to learn form dragon. There is no plot development, and the characters are non-existent behind their facades as fighter pilots. You don't have to write like Henry James to turn out at least a very decent technothriller. Nothing else will grab you here - the war scenario in the mideast seems like the same thing you've seen in other books and countless flight simulator games. The enemy is too thin to even rate being called "cardboard" - physically and morally scarred, with an agenda, weapons of mass destruction and the ear of corrupt Soviets, he's closer in consistency to that thin sheet stuff they put on overhead projectors. Skinner took half of an interesting idea, and killed it. The idea of a story about mercenary fighter pilots is cool because it avoids the trap of letting or forcing the author to swap the action we want for tired demonstrations of his experience with the bureaucratic nuts and bolts of an established air force. However, the idea only works if the writer replaces the boring stuff with the action we want. Also, since the story puts the mercenary pilots essentially in charge of themselves, we would have a unique opportunity to see what an air force would look like if it were run by the people who do the flying. Skinner doesn't just flub on that score, he doesn't deal with it at all - the pilots never form a cohesive unit, they just fly. Skinner's idea essentially takes all the boring guts out of your standard military aviation novel, and doesn't put replace it with anything.

This book was really boring. I mean sure there were some interesting secnes, but I think the author presented an unrealistic plot, and didn't concentrate on the important stuff. He casually remarks that someone just nuked Baghdad and dedicates about a paragraph to that. And by the way, who won that dogfight at the end? Ah, who cares. Still for all its faults, its better than a lot of the trash I've read

First Air is a great book about war and gives a greatly detailed view on the persian gulf war, written around desert storm you won't regret picking this book up, I know I didn't; Some may find it a little weird but if you read through and use your imagination you'll have a great experience with this book.

Could have been a script from Jerry Bruckheimer flick (although the only F18s that Bruckheimer has such a stock for get slaughtered here). It realy aught to be made into a summer movie, or better yet, sold to the Japanese and drawn up as an epic Anime movie, but as it is, its a good quick read for those stuck somewhere for a few hours, or just sick of reading "War and Peace" or "Homage to Catalonia" weighted novels.

I read this book back in 1992 when I was 14 and it gave me the idea to create online 'squadrons' on the Prodigy network's bulliten boards that drew up offline mission story lines for flight-sim nuts, and tied them into huge online storylines/campaigns, before the advent of good campaigning sims/online multiplayer play. As far as I know, my "First Air" or FAR was the first such organization in a catagory that has since boomed and become very involved now that people can fly and fight togather through the wonder of the Net.

Also gave me the pipe dream of buying my own F8 Crusaider and going off to fight as an aireal mercinary.

As another asside, it was also the inspiration for the 1993 release of Origin's "Strike Commander"