Flight from the Croft

Author: Bill Innes
Publisher: Whittles
ISBN: 9781849953979
Category : Air pilots
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
As a barefoot lad in the Outer Hebrides, Bill Innes dreamed the impossible dream of becoming a pilot and this book tells how that dream came to pass. The author's career of over forty years spanned a period of incredible advances in the air - now regarded as a golden era in aviation. After gaining his RAF wings in Canada he really started to learn his trade by flying pre-war Dakotas for British European Airways around the Highlands and Islands of Scotland - one of the most testing aviation-operating areas in the world. The experience was to stand him in good stead as he moved to London to fly classic 20th century British aircraft such as the Viscount, Comet, Vanguard and Trident. The narrative comes alive through tales of the many characters encountered in a time before flight recorders. There are authentic versions of some of the most famous anecdotes in the folklore of the sky, but also reflections on training philosophy and techniques which have a relevance outwith aviation. Along the way he explored his limits, barnstorming vintage aircraft in Tiger Club displays - surviving one breach of those limits which should have proved fatal!Progressing to being a training captain, Bill was happy to pass on his experience to colleagues. As one of the team that introduced the Boeing 757 to British Airways, post-retirement, he was privileged to be the trainer on the first flights of charter airlines such as Air 2000 and Canada 3000 before his swansong, flying long range Boeing 767s for Alitalia.Technical background is lightened by the thread of humour which runs throughout and there are also some sage words of comfort for the nervous passenger.

Flights

Author: Olga Tokarczuk
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525534210
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE A visionary work of fiction by "A writer on the level of W. G. Sebald" (Annie Proulx) "A magnificent writer." — Svetlana Alexievich, Nobel Prize-winning author of Secondhand Time "A beautifully fragmented look at man's longing for permanence.... Ambitious and complex." — Washington Post From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller's answer.

The Lost Soul

Author: Olga Tokarczuk
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1644210355
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 46

Book Description
A beautifully illustrated meditation on the fullness of life for readers of all ages by by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Olga Tokarczuk. "Olga Tokarczuk’s The Lost Soul, an experimental fable illustrated by Joanna Concejo and translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, resonates with our current moment. . . . What a striking, and lovely, material object it is." —New York Times "The Lost Soul, by Olga Tokarczuk and illustrator Joanna Concejo, is a quiet meditation on happiness, following a busy man who loses his soul. . . It pours a childlike sense of wonder into a once-upon-a-time tale that is already resonating with adults around the world." —The Guardian The Lost Soul is a deeply moving reflection on our capacity to live in peace with ourselves, to remain patient, attentive to the world. It is a story that beautifully weaves together the voice of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk and the finely detailed pen-and-ink drawings of illustrator Joanna Concejo, who together create a parallel narrative universe full of secrets, evocative of another time. Here a man has forgotten what makes his heart feel full. He moves to a house away from all that is familiar to him to wait for his soul to return. "Once upon a time there was a man who worked very hard and very quickly, and who had left his soul far behind him long ago. In fact his life was all right without his soul—he slept, ate, worked, drove a car and even played tennis. But sometimes he felt as if the world around him were flat, as if he were moving across a smooth page in a math book that was covered in evenly spaced squares... " —from The Lost Soul The Lost Soul is a sublime album, a rare delicacy that will delight readers young and old. "You must find a place of your own, sit there quietly and wait for your soul." Winner of the Bologna Ragazzi Award, Special Mention 2018, Prix de l'Union Internationale pour les Livres de Jeunesse (IBBY), The White Raven (IJB Munich), and the Łódź Design Festival Award.

Come Fly with Us

Author: Melvin Croft
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 149621224X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Book Description
2020 Space Hipsters Prize for Best Book in Astronomy, Space Exploration, or Space History Come Fly with Us is the story of an elite group of space travelers who flew as members of many space shuttle crews from pre-Challenger days to Columbia in 2003. Not part of the regular NASA astronaut corps, these professionals known as "payload specialists" came from a wide variety of backgrounds and were chosen for an equally wide variety of scientific, political, and national security reasons. Melvin Croft and John Youskauskas focus on this special fraternity of spacefarers and their individual reflections on living and working in space. Relatively unknown to the public and often flying only single missions, these payload specialists give the reader an unusual perspective on the experience of human spaceflight. The authors also bring to light NASA's struggle to integrate the wide-ranging personalities and professions of these men and women into the professional astronaut ranks. While Come Fly with Us relates the experiences of the payload specialists up to and including the Challenger tragedy, the authors also detail the later high-profile flights of a select few, including Barbara Morgan, John Glenn (who returned to space at the age of seventy-seven), and Ilan Ramon of Israel aboard Columbia on its final, fatal flight, STS-107.

An Unnecessary Woman

Author: Rabih Alameddine
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802192874
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
A happily misanthropic Middle East divorcee finds refuge in books in a “beautiful and absorbing” novel of late-life crisis (The New York Times). Aaliya is a divorced, childless, and reclusively cranky translator in Beirut nurturing doubts about her latest project: a 900-page avant-garde, linguistically serpentine historiography by a late Chilean existentialist. Honestly, at seventy-two, should she be taking on such a project? Not that Aailiya fears dying. Women in her family live long; her mother is still going crazy. But on this lonely day, hour-by-hour, Aaliya’s musings on literature, philosophy, her career, and her aging body, are suddenly invaded by memories of her volatile past. As she tries in vain to ward off these emotional upwellings, Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left. In this “meditation on, among other things, aging, politics, literature, loneliness, grief and resilience” (The New York Times), Alameddine conjures “a beguiling narrator . . . who is, like her city, hard to read, hard to take, hard to know and, ultimately, passionately complex” (San Francisco Chronicle). A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, An Unnecessary Woman is “a fun, and often funny . . . grave, powerful . . . [and] extraordinary” Washington Independent Review of Books) ode to literature and its power to define who we are. “Read it once, read it twice, read other books for a decade or so, and then pick it up and read it anew. This one’s a keeper” (The Independent)

The Croft's in the America's

Author: Richard Rogers
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1479722448
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
Lord Croft is back! Moving abroad in an attempt to evade an investigation by MI5, this the second novel in the series, takes Lord Croft to the Caribbean, where far from finding peace, he is forced to take reprisals against the very group he had planned to avoid and to add to his woes he finds himself on the radar of the Mafia, USA and Venezuelan Customs Patrols as he fights for survival. His wife and his crew are viciously raped and brutalised and he seeks revenge. Follow his wake of destruction as he takes on pirates and multiple sectors of law enforcement as he continues his life of crime and sexual pleasure. --- Richard Rogers

Flight of the Skimming Bird

Author: Alastair Macleod
Publisher: BookRix
ISBN: 3730987976
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Book Description
In 1917 Ronald Copeland is one of the first pilots to fly a seaplane out of the Royal Navy base in Scapa Flow, spotting for enemy submarines. There are many islands; he becomes confused in the fog and finds himself on one that doesn't seem to fit, and it begins to hold him in its magic grasp.

Homesick

Author: Jennifer Croft
Publisher: Charco Press
ISBN: 1913867323
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 153

Book Description
The coming of age story of an award-winning translator, Homesick is about learning to love language in its many forms, healing through words and the promises and perils of empathy and sisterhood. Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first. Amy's first love appears in the form of her Russian tutor Sasha, but when she enters university at the age of 15 her life changes drastically and with tragic results. "Croft moves quickly between powerful scenes that made me think about my own sisters. I love how the language displays a child's consciousness. A haunting accomplishment." Kali Fajardo-Anstine

The Last Flight of the Arrow

Author: Daniel Wyatt
Publisher: Mushroom Publishing
ISBN: 1843197340
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
February 20, 1959, the Canadian prime minister stood before the House of Commons to announce that his government had decided to cancel the CF-105 Avro Arrow supersonic fighter-interceptor program. What were the reasons... the REAL reasons? Were the Americans involved? In this tale of intrigue, the Russians plan an air strike on North America. Canadian and American Intelligence get wind of it through secret channels. The Canadians pretend to terminate the Arrow and then - with the help of the Americans - deploy the machine for what it was designed for. It's mission: catch the Russians with evidence of its strike force. While the public mourns the death of the supersonic fighter, the Arrow blasts its way across the Pacific on a vital, long-range, photo-recon mission to save the Free World and avert World War III. Behind the controls is a hand-picked Royal Canadian Air Force pilot. Target - Siberia.

Life Flight

Author: Lynette Eason
Publisher: Revell
ISBN: 9780800737337
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
EMS helicopter pilot Penny Carlton is used to high stress situations, but being forced to land on a mountain in a raging storm with a critical patient--and a serial killer on the loose--tests her skills and her nerve to the limit. She survives with FBI Special Agent Holt Satterfield's help. But she's not out of the woods yet. In the ensuing days, Penny finds herself under attack. And when news reaches Holt that he may not have gotten his man after all, it will take all he and Penny have to catch a killer--before he catches one of them. Bestselling and award-winning author Lynette Eason is back with another high-octane tale of close calls, narrow escapes, and the fight to bring a nefarious criminal to justice.