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John Cunningham's wartime fame as an outstanding night-fighter ace was followed by a long career in test flying during the exciting post-war period when the jet engine was developed to power both military and civil aircraft. As chief test pilot for the de Havilland Aircraft Company he was at the leading edge of the quest for supersonic flight and in the development of the Comet, the world's first jet airliner. As "Cat's-eyes Cunningham" he became a household name during the bombing blitz of Brit...

'A soaring gift of a book' Owen Sheers'Remarkable' Mark Vanhoenacker, author of Skyfaring'Stunning . . . a love letter to nature' Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of LoveThe day she flew in a glider for the first time, Rebecca Loncraine fell in love. Months of gruelling treatment for breast cancer meant she had lost touch with the world around her, but in that engineless plane, soaring 3,000 feet over the landscape of her childhood, with only the rising thermals to take her higher and...

Douglas Bader was a legend in his lifetime and remains one today 100 years after his birth. A charismatic leader and fearless pilot he refused to let his severe disability (loss of both legs in a flying accident) ground him. He fought the authorities as ruthless as he did the enemy and not only managed to return to the front line but became a top scoring ace. His innovative tactics (The Big Wing) ensured his promotion and he led a key group of squadrons during the dark days of the Battle of B...

Major Roderick Dallas is Australia's leading air ace of all time and, with fifty victories, also one of the highest-scoring Commonwealth aces. Even so, until this excellently researched volume, there has never been a full biography of this exceptional pilot, whose fighting career spanned from 1916 to 1918. Flying Nieuport Scouts, Triplanes and Camels with the RNAS and RAF, he was an ever-present threat over the Western Front and the scourge of the German Air Force. Hellwig's book has been taken...

Life Between the Levees is a chronicle of first-person reflections and folklore from pilots who have dedicated their lives to the river. The stories are as diverse as the storytellers themselves, and the volume is full of drama, suspense, and a way of life a "landlubber" could never imagine. Although waterways and ports in the Mississippi corridor move billions of dollars of products throughout the US and foreign markets, in today's world those who live and work on land have little knowledge of...

Ben Bennion enlisted in the pre-war RAF, serving first as an 'erk' before being selected for pilot training. His first posting led to service in the Middle -East and Bennion's passport and other travel documents had to be rushed through. A clerical error led to his name being recorded as 'Bennions'. Ben served in 41 Squadron and, following their overseas tour he returned to the UK and Catterick. Patrols and scrambles were common throughout the early months of the war, but it was in May 1940, th...

This is the biography of one of the Royal Navy's legendary pilots. BF or Daddy as he was known, started his career at Dartmouth and then spent his early seagoing years in Hong Kong, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. His wartime experiences as a Fleet Air pilot aboard HMS Glorious included the historic air strike at Taranto and the search for the Graf Spee. In May 1940 he was loaned to Coastal Command and attacked German Panzer tanks in a biplane, defended Allied troops over Dunkirk and was one of only a f...

When a proud Adolf Hitler revealed his new Luftwaffe to the world in March 1935, it was the largest, most modern military air arm the world had seen. Equipped with the latest monoplane fighter and bomber aircraft manned by well-trained and motivated crews, it soon became evident that the Luftwaffe also possessed a high degree of technical superiority over Germany's future enemies. Yet within just nine years the once-mightiest air force in the world had reached total collapse, destroyed in part...

Malta in the summer of 1942, a Malta wide open to air attack from the Germans and Italians and defended by a handful of Spitfires and a few anti-aircraft guns. Denis Barnham, a young and inexperienced flight lieutenant, spent ten hectic weeks on this indomitable island; he left a well-ordered English aerodrome for the chaos and disillusionment of Luqa. His task was to engage the overwhelming number of enemy bombers, usually protected by fighter escorts, and shoot down as many as possible. The Sp...

The newest addition to the Grub Street Classics range is this fascinating, insightful and, at times, nail-biting account by the World War One veteran, Leonard H. Rochford. This book has been out of print for more than thirty years and we are delighted to be putting it back on the shelves. In these exciting memoirs, ‘Tich’ Rochford writes about his two action-filled years as a World War I fighter pilot with the famous No. 3 (Naval) Squadron when he flew planes such as the Sopwith Pup and the Sopw...

Ben Walsh lied about his age to join the RAF, determined to play his part in the Second World War. He volunteered to be an intruder pilot, flying low level operations in the dark. Initially flying ops in Douglas Boston Intruder IIs, he then converted to the legendary de Havilland Mosquito FB VI. Ben flew ops for three years, starting in the skies over with Europe with 418 (RCAF) Squadron, then ferrying one of the first Mosquito FB VIs to India before flying in the Burma campaign with 27 Squadron...

Charles Rolls was the first Englishman to be killed in an air crash. He was thirty years old. Rolls' death shocked the country and made headlines across the world. His relative youth at the time is perhaps the reason that he is a forgotten hero; a man who today receives little credit for the legacy that he left behind, even though at the time of his death on July 12th 1910 he was one of the most famous men in the country. His loss was regarded as a national tragedy. Today he is most famous for t...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, started his literary career with the publication of The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor . . . 'On February 22 we were told that we would be returning to Columbia'In 1955 eight crew members of Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were swept overboard. Velasco alone survived, drifting on a raft for ten days without food or water. Marquez retells the survivor's amazing tale of endurance, from...

Duke started WWII as a fighter pilot with 92 Squadron at RAF Biggin Hill. Awarded the DSO, he became an RAF test pilot towards the end of the war, and continued as a peacetime test pilot with the Hawker Aviation Company. Published in 2003, marking the 50th anniversary of the Hawker Hunter’s world speed record.

Thanks to a broken leg during flight school, Arthur Stanley Gould Lee gained valuable additional time flying trainers before he was posted to France during World War I. In November 1917 during low-level bombing and strafing attacks, he was shot down three times by ground fire. He spent eight months at the front and accumulated 222 hours of flight time in Sopwith Pups and Camels during a staggering 118 patrols; being engaged in combat fifty-six times. He lived to retire from the RAF as an air vic...