When Penguins Flew and Water Burned [Paperback]

Jim Clonts (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 8, 2006

This is the true memoir of one US Air Force navigator's journey from the schoolhouses of Air Training Command to the nuclear alerts of the Cold War to combat in a 35-year-old anachronism called the B-52. It is a first-hand account of life during the last days of Strategic Air Command, the early day of Air Combat Command and the ensuing military drawdown of the 1990s. From peacetime training exercises across the globe to combat operations in Desert Storm, Jim Clonts takes the reader inside the cockpit where life and death are seconds apart. Often comical, sometimes heart-pounding, other times tragic, WHEN PENGUINS FLEW AND WATER BURNED takes you into the world of military aviation, a crucible where warriors learn the true nature of character, conscience and mortality.

Product Details

• Paperback: 452 pages
• Publisher: Lulu.com; 1St Edition edition (October 8, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1411674650
• ISBN-13: 978-1411674653
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,208,418 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Read of the Modern Day Navigator, April 30, 2010

By 

Olongapo86 (Philippines) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When Penguins Flew and Water Burned (Paperback)

This is a very good book which is both enjoyable to read and interesting for the reader desiring to learn just what the modern military navigator does. The author is a fine wordsmith, and writes in an active style which makes for zero flat or dull moments along the way. Style can make or break a book, and in this book it "makes it". I have been interested in aviation books that deal with the evolution of the navigator, and there are many great ones out there. But in today's age, the vocation has been replaced in commercial aviation with GPS, etc. The military still uses navigators, and I have always been interested in learning how they practice their art today.

Well, this book delivers those facts and more! It starts out at day 1 of undergraduate navigation training school in the late 80's and moves continually through B-52 training and Desert Storm. It's a personal story that weaves the life of the author ( a young Air Force Captain)throughout his military career as a navigator. The deployments, long flights, and the details of the navigator's part of the collective mission are all spelled out, and the reader actually feels like he has - at the end of the book - just completed a 10 year tour as an Air Force navigator.

The equipment of the navigator is all described technically as easy to understand as is possible, although this is not always possible to do...how could it be done? It takes 6 months of training to understand the gizmos and gyros, etc! But, in those rare instances, the reader gets the drift (a navigation term, coincidentally).

For anyone interested in what a B-52 modern day crew does, this book will satisfy their curiosity. It does a fine job of commenting on all the other roles and positions of the crewmembers, so the reader pretty much understands what is going on during flight of all the crewmembers. The author relates actual crew conversations during flight and I found this to be extremely enjoyable. I rate this book as high as Maj Lothar Maier's book "B*U*F*F (fiction but pretty much the real deal). Both authors are highly insightful and observant, which makes both books great reads.

Definitely get this book if you want to know about the B-52, what B-52 crews do and how they think, and what the modern day navigator does in the B-52 or military today.

Finally, the author contributes to the debunking of the myth that navigators are all pilot school washouts. Navigators may aspire to be pilots, but that doesn't mean they actually did not want to be a navigator. The author is proud of his navigator wings, and that's a plus in my book (no pun intended).

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The very best of first-person aviation history, November 8, 2011

By 

C.C.J. (Alexandria, VA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: When Penguins Flew and Water Burned (Kindle Edition)

This is really a fantastic work of aviation history. The author very skillfully captures the full spectrum of emotions associated with the high stress of flight training, the challenges of combat flying, and the intricacies of flying in a multi-crew military aircraft. The writing style keeps you riveted and allows you to experience a full range of emotions from laughter to cynicism to fear. As a military aviator, I really applaud this work as one of the few out there that perfectly captures what it's like to fight modern wars in modern (or in some cases, not-so-modern) military aircraft. This book moved to the very top of my list of books to share with my sons to give them a feel for my own wartime experiences. Thank you Mr. Clonts for your outstanding work and for your service.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is fantastic, and I should know..., October 25, 2011

By 

Scott C. Barbu (Maryland Heights, MO, US) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: When Penguins Flew and Water Burned (Kindle Edition)

I went through navigator training at the now-defunct Mather Air Force Base just a couple of years before Mr. Clonts went through, and I had to smile as I read the book, as it was like watching an episode of "this is your life" as we had a lot of parallel experiences (just in case you're curious, the Friday JOC nights at Mather really did happen). I too went to Strategic Air Command and crewed on a B-52, albeit as an Electronic Warfare Officer on the upper deck, for several years in the late 80's up until Desert Storm. I too went to Diego Garcia in the frantic rush to get a mission in before the war ended after being shipped out from K.I.Sawyer AFB (we arrived in country literally the day after the B-52 accident on D.G.), and became part the only "H" model crew from the island to fly combat on the very last night of the war. This book is rich with detail on the life and the psychology of what is was like to be an alert-pulling "crewdog" in SAC. The Navigator was often the hardest-working member of the crew during flights, and especially during low level routes, and was often a brand new Second Lieutenant on his very first assignment. Talk about sink or swim! This was just about the toughest job a recent college grad could ask for, and Jim succeeded admirably!