Customer Reviews

Wild Blue: Stories of Survival from Air and Space

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I am a student pilot working on my private pilot's license and have been wrestling with my own fears and anxiety while flying solo. A friend got me this book for Christmas, and the stories have been so riveting and inspirational - now I can't wait to go flying again! What sets this book apart is the quality of the writing and the storytelling - each of the authors/writers in this compilation is skilled not only in flying but with the written word! Excellent, I cannot recommend this book highly enough!!

This book is awesome if you want to get a taste of everything that great aviation writing has to offer. There are stories from almost every top-notch book in aviation and you'll probably do like I did and buy every book represented in Wild Blue. The stories are hand picked from selected novels and they will all have you glued to the book, this is one of those books that you just can't bring yourself to put down. Check out my other reviews on the books represented in this one...

If you love stories of air or space, read this book. I don't have time to read every good book in the field, so the selected cream of the crop is much appreciated.

Each segment is culled from the best in aviation stories and leaves you wanting to read more of the original work. I started it on a flight from Chicago to Seattle and never put it down. I'm on my way to buy "Fate is the Hunter."

I have been absolutely riveted by this anthology and I'm going to be sad when it's over. I am a private pilot and the passages got my heart pounding reading the exploits in here, ranging from Berryl Markhams 21 and 1/2 hour flight from the UK to North America, the teen-age brothers going over Guadalupe Pass in New Mexico (11,600 feet in a Piper Cub!), an Air Force Forward Air Controller marking bombing sites in the Vietnam jungle under heavy fire, or a Navy pilot doing night carrier landing qualifications on the eve of the Gulf War.

I second the reviewer above that I will be next getting Ernest Gann's "Fate is the Hunter" real soon: the description of an icing encounter in the early post-war days of airline transport was terrifying. I've not had the intensity of experience of these writers, but I can really appreciate it.

The quality of the writing is top-notch, so that non-aviators will be able to appreciate these experiences. I would hasten to add that 99.9% of aviation does not have this level of intensity.

This a fabulous anthology.