Military Aviation

Book 1 is a series of stories of my company-grade years beginning with learning to be a Marine Corps officer, then naval aviator. My first squadron experiences include learning to fly the first Marine Corps CH-53, being deployed overseas to Vietnam for my first of three combat tours, which are all described in book 1.

A fireball over the Arctic. A missing hydrogen bomb. A Cold War program exposed in a single, shattering night. Before dawn on January 21, 1968, a U.S. Air Force B-52G code-named HOBO 28 streaked across the polar sky carrying four thermonuclear weapons. Its mission—Operation Chrome Dome—kept nuclear-armed bombers in the air 24/7, ready to strike Moscow in minutes. But when a cockpit fire roared through the bomber at 41,000 feet, the crew faced an unthinkable choice: burn alive or bail out into −60 °F darkness. Minutes later a mushroom-shaped blast lit North Star Bay, scattering ...

Here are thrilling, never-before-heard stories of the Army's elite aviation unit - the most daring and professional helicopter crews in the world. Special Operations pilots are notoriously reticent; they don't talk about their missions, at least not to anyone outside their small community. But now, with the publication of The Night Stalkers, Durant and Steven Hartov shed a fascinating light on these mysterious super commandos and take readers into a world they have only imagined.

In 1967, something has changed, and not in a good way. For the first time, the communists are holding territory that they have captured near the borders of Laos and North Vietnam. It could be that the leaders in Hanoi want to secure supply and reinforcement routes into South Vietnam… or it could be something far more nefarious. The communists’ new strategy is an opportunity for the U.S. military and its allies to finally engage their enemy in a large-scale, set-piece battle that would allow American airpower and artillery to destroy a massive enemy force. It’s tempting bait. Such a ...

In 1942, Norman Hanson learned to fly the Royal Navy's newest fighter: the US-built Chance Vought Corsair. Fast, rugged, and demanding to fly, it was an intimidating machine. But in the hands of its young Fleet Air Arm pilots, it also proved to be a lethal weapon. Posted to the South Pacific aboard HMS Illustrious, Hanson and his squadron took the fight to the Japanese. Facing a desperate and determined enemy, Kamikaze attacks, and the ever-present dangers of flying off a pitching carrier deck, death was never far away.

In a hidden base in China, Lieutenant General He Chen licks his wounds. The Devil Dragon project lies in ruins, thanks to the heroics of US Air Force Reserve Captain Ford Stevens and Stevens's best friend, pilot Wu Lee. But now Lee is gone, and as Stevens mourns the loss of his friend, Chen works to complete his second spy plane, codenamed Black Scorpion.

In the near future, the United States has fought a short, bloody war with China in the Pacific. The fighting is over, but the US Navy maintains a blockade. Some call it the First Sino-American War. Others worry it is the start of World War III. In a prison cell in Beijing, Navy fighter pilot Jack Knapp tells his story about the victory in the Battle of Taiwan and how he ended up in a Chinese show trial, accused of crimes against humanity. With his life in the balance, Jack will have to choose between survival and participating in his captors’ lies.

The A-10 has become an important element of CAS and FAC and is like the grizzled old-school soldier of the USAF. It's never been an aviation beauty queen, it's not super-fast, it's not even full to the brim of state of the art electronics. It just shows up, gets angry, scares the hell out enemy ground forces, and goes home. It’s nickname ‘Warthog’ says it all, angry looking and not the prettiest. But still the best ground attack aircraft in service and proven itself in Iraq and Afghanistan. The A-10 Thunderbolt II saw almost constant use in Afghanistan, proving itself yet again, as ...

This is a true story about a man who was passionate about airplanes—flying them, designing them and building them. His innovative designs and creative vision were so much a part of aviation history that his breakthrough biplane design, the Staggerwing, shown on the cover of this book, hangs in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. Ted Wells not only designed the Staggerwing, but also the Bonanza and many other extremely popular and enduring commercial and military aircraft. Beech Aircraft, the company he co-founded with Walter and Olive Ann Beech...

“The Air Force’s Black Pilot Training Experience” highlights the unique experiences of black pilots in Air Force pilot training. The purpose of the book is to give the reader insight into these experiences, propose changes to the Air Force’s conduct of Specialized Undergraduate Pilot Training (SUPT) and to show how the Air Force’s inability to produce more black pilots directly contributes to the lack of diversity in its senior-most leadership levels. This book is a sequel to “The Air Force’s Black Ceiling” and builds on its insights. As a sequel, the book exhorts the Air ...

A World War II Military Thriller Inspired by True Events of the Winter War In the frozen skies of 1939 Finland, death doesn’t come from above—it hunts in formation. As the Soviet invasion begins, Finnish fighter ace Lieutenant Veikko Niemi takes to the air in his outclassed Fokker D.XXI, battling overwhelming numbers in defense of his homeland. But something is different this time. The Soviet pilots aren't flying blind bombing runs—they’re coordinated, precise, and deadly. Led by the enigmatic Major Grigori Chernyavin, a disgraced stunt pilot returned from Stalin’s purges, the ...

In February 1942, a reconnaissance party of US Army Air Force officers arrived in England. Firmly wedded to the doctrine of daylight precision bombing, they believed they could help turn the tide of the war in Europe. In the months that followed, they formed the Eighth Air Force—an organization that grew at an astonishing rate. To accommodate it, almost seventy airfields were built across the eastern counties of England. At the heart of the Eighth Air Force was its bombardment groups, each equipped with scores of heavily armed, four-engine bombers. This is the story of just one "Bomb Group".

1914 and the start of WW1, the Royal Navy has a tiny, fledgling air service with a small number of unreliable and underperforming aircraft, with no real clue about how to use them. Four years later, they had thousands of fighters including the best of the war, hundreds of seaplanes and the ships to carry them and hundreds of airships patrolling for submarines. They had been used at sea and overland from the Dardanelles to the Western Front and the Mediterranean. Bob Hunt was one of those early aviators. His story and that of his friend Arnold St John-Stevens form the narrative of how the ...

Tired after eleven years of serving as flying 'Soldiers of Fortune' in South American wars and as 'Internationalistas' in the service of Republican Spain, Ricart, Wing, and Wilson have moved to the forests of Northern Michigan after fighting to the bitter end in Spain.Gathering Spanish refugees and Upper Peninsula locals, they start to form a manufacturing firm, building primary gliders and glider launching winches. The lure of big money temps Eddie Ricart to build the largest transport aircraft in the world from "acquired" plans and force the US military establishment to employ it by ...

Holding the Line chronicles the carrier war in Korea from the first day of the war to the last, focusing on frontline combat while also describing the technical development of aircraft and shipboard operations and how these all affected the broader strategic situation on the Korean Peninsula.

There were no mission limits for a pilot in the Pacific during World War II; unlike in Europe, you flew until it was time to go home. So it was for James "Jug" Curran, all the way from New Guinea to the Philippines with the 348th Fighter Group, the first P-47 Thunderbolt outfit in the Pacific. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Curran volunteered to try flying in the blue yonder and trained as an Army fighter pilot. He got his wish to fly the P-47 in the Pacific, going into combat in August 1943, in New Guinea, and later helping start the "Black Rams" fighter squadron.

From the cockpit of an F/A-18 Hornet, U.S. Navy Commander Frank Weisser conveys the lessons he learned flying as the Lead Solo for the Blue Angels, on multiple combat deployments, and as stunt pilot for Top Gun: Maverick. Each chapter opens with a flight sequence and describes a lesson, skill, or value that Weisser learned in the sky and that carried him through a life of service with the Navy: finding focus, developing trust, opening communication, overcoming adversity, facing failure, and recognizing courage within oneself.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was one of the iconic figures of the 20th century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb but later confronted the moral consequences of scientific progress. When he proposed international controls over atomic materials, opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb, and criticized plans for a nuclear war, his ideas were anathema to powerful advocates of a massive nuclear buildup during the anti-Communist hysteria of the early 1950s.

Escaping certain death, not once but several times, lies at the core of this riveting, real-life story of an American soldier during World War II. In One Man's War: The WW II Saga of Tommy LaMore, a B-17 airman vividly details his experiences in war-ravaged Europe, from the horrific to the romantic and beyond.

Concealed deep within China's inland borders is one of the most secret airplanes ever flown, known as Devil Dragon. She's sleek, unbelievably fast, and mysterious - her test pilots have one mission in mind: make her test flights successful for operational use as soon as possible. Or sooner. But when strange transmissions of pilots are recorded without an aircraft appearing on radar and bizarre cell phone signals are detected at towers hundreds of miles apart, Ford Stevens is asked to take on the most dangerous assignment of his life.