Author: Bill ScollonPublisher: RH/Disney
ISBN: 0736430164
Category : Airplane racing
Languages : en
Pages : 26
Book Description
Small-town crop duster Dusty Crophopper participates in a race around the world.
Wings Around the World
Author: Polly VacherPublisher: Grub Street Publishing
ISBN: 1909166472
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Book Description
A pilot’s account of her around-the-world adventure, including color photos. On May 6, 2003, Polly Vacher, a fifty-nine-year-old mother of three, took off from an airport in Birmingham, England, seeking to become the first pilot to complete a solo flight around the world, via both Poles, in a single-engine aircraft. Despite having only a few years of flying experience, Polly had already completed a lateral solo circumnavigation of the world in 2001 for the charity Flying Scholarships for the Disabled. This second challenge, for the same charity, would make that achievement look like a casual jaunt. There would be no margin for error. Her voyage to the ice was a thirty-five thousand–mile adventure in her Piper Dakota that would take her to at least thirty different countries on every single continent. She had prepared meticulously for two years, was fully insured, and had all the requisite permits and visas. With her kinetic enthusiasm, charm, and persistence, she had already garnered numerous sponsors. However, as she took off on that blustery spring day—flanked by a Hurricane and a Spitfire and waved off by her family and the Prince of Wales—she suddenly felt so alone. She had begun a remarkable expedition that would gain her three world records—but would also encounter extremes of weather and emotion, much kindness and obstruction, and a little political intrigue. This is the story of that adventure. “Truly inspirational.” —Aviation News
Wings Around the World
Author: Polly VacherPublisher: Grub Street Publishing
ISBN: 9781904943990
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Polly Vacher wanted to become the first pilot to complete a solo flight around the world via both Poles in a single-engine aircraft. Her 60,000 mile voyage would take her to every continent. She prepared meticulously for two years and had garnered multifarious sponsors. However, as she took off, flanked by a Hurricane and a Spitfire, and waved off by her family and the Prince of Wales, she suddenly felt so alone. She had begun a remarkable expedition that would gain her three world records, but would also see her encounter extremes of weather and emotion, kindness, obstruction and also a little political intrigue.
Author: Burr Watkins LeysonWings
Author: Karl FriedrichPublisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1590135911
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
Based on the true World War II stories of America's first female military pilots, this historic novel follows the story of a young woman from a dirt-poor farm family. Sally Ketchum has little chance of bettering her life until a mysterious barnstormer named Tex teaches her to fly and to dare to love. But when Tex dies in a freak accident, Sally must make her own way in the world. She enrolls in the U.S. military's Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program at a special school known as Avenger, where she learns to fly the biggest, fastest, meanest planes. She also reluctantly becomes involved with Beau Bayard, a flight instructor and aspiring writer who seems to offer her everything she could want. Despite her obvious mastery of flying, many members of the military are unable to accept that a “skirt” has any place in a cockpit. Soon Sally finds herself struggling against a high-powered Washington lawyer that wants to close down Avenger once and for all.
A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds
Author: Scott WeidensaulPublisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393608913
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 383
Book Description
New York Times Bestseller Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A Library Journal Best Science and Technology Book of the Year An exhilarating exploration of the science and wonder of global bird migration. In the past two decades, our understanding of the navigational and physiological feats that enable birds to cross immense oceans, fly above the highest mountains, or remain in unbroken flight for months at a stretch has exploded. What we’ve learned of these key migrations—how billions of birds circumnavigate the globe, flying tens of thousands of miles between hemispheres on an annual basis—is nothing short of extraordinary. Bird migration entails almost unfathomable endurance, like a sparrow-sized sandpiper that will fly nonstop from Canada to Venezuela—the equivalent of running 126 consecutive marathons without food, water, or rest—avoiding dehydration by "drinking" moisture from its own muscles and organs, while orienting itself using the earth’s magnetic field through a form of quantum entanglement that made Einstein queasy. Crossing the Pacific Ocean in nine days of nonstop flight, as some birds do, leaves little time for sleep, but migrants can put half their brains to sleep for a few seconds at a time, alternating sides—and their reaction time actually improves. These and other revelations convey both the wonder of bird migration and its global sweep, from the mudflats of the Yellow Sea in China to the remote mountains of northeastern India to the dusty hills of southern Cyprus. This breathtaking work of nature writing from Pulitzer Prize finalist Scott Weidensaul also introduces readers to those scientists, researchers, and bird lovers trying to preserve global migratory patterns in the face of climate change and other environmental challenges. Drawing on his own extensive fieldwork, in A World on the Wing Weidensaul unveils with dazzling prose the miracle of nature taking place over our heads.
China's Wings
Author: Gregory CrouchPublisher: Bantam
ISBN: 034553235X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 545
Book Description
From the acclaimed author of Enduring Patagonia comes a dazzling tale of aerial adventure set against the roiling backdrop of war in Asia. The incredible real-life saga of the flying band of brothers who opened the skies over China in the years leading up to World War II—and boldly safeguarded them during that conflict—China’s Wings is one of the most exhilarating untold chapters in the annals of flight. At the center of the maelstrom is the book’s courtly, laconic protagonist, American aviation executive William Langhorne Bond. In search of adventure, he arrives in Nationalist China in 1931, charged with turning around the turbulent nation’s flagging airline business, the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC). The mission will take him to the wild and lawless frontiers of commercial aviation: into cockpits with daredevil pilots flying—sometimes literally—on a wing and a prayer; into the dangerous maze of Chinese politics, where scheming warlords and volatile military officers jockey for advantage; and into the boardrooms, backrooms, and corridors of power inhabited by such outsized figures as Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; foreign minister T. V. Soong; Generals Arnold, Stilwell, and Marshall; and legendary Pan American Airways founder Juan Trippe. With the outbreak of full-scale war in 1941, Bond and CNAC are transformed from uneasy spectators to active participants in the struggle against Axis imperialism. Drawing on meticulous research, primary sources, and extensive personal interviews with participants, Gregory Crouch offers harrowing accounts of brutal bombing runs and heroic evacuations, as the fight to keep one airline flying becomes part of the larger struggle for China’s survival. He plunges us into a world of perilous night flights, emergency water landings, and the constant threat of predatory Japanese warplanes. When Japanese forces capture Burma and blockade China’s only overland supply route, Bond and his pilots must battle shortages of airplanes, personnel, and spare parts to airlift supplies over an untried five-hundred-mile-long aerial gauntlet high above the Himalayas—the infamous “Hump”—pioneering one of the most celebrated endeavors in aviation history. A hero’s-eye view of history in the grand tradition of Lynne Olson’s Citizens of London, China’s Wings takes readers on a mesmerizing journey to a time and place that reshaped the modern world.
Audubon, On The Wings Of The World [Graphic Novel]
![Audubon, On The Wings Of The World [Graphic Novel] PDF](https://books.google.com/books/content/images/frontcover/ZhaREAAAQBAJ?fife=w150-h200)
Author: Fabien GrolleauPublisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1910620157
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
At the start of the nineteenth century, John James Audubon embarked upon an epic ornithological quest across America with nothing but his artist’ s materials, an assistant, a gun and an all-consuming passion for birds... This beautiful volume tells the story of an incredible artist and adventurer: one who encapsulates the spirit of early America, when the wilderness felt limitless and was still greatly unexplored. Based on Audubon's own retellings, this graphic novel version of his travels captures the wild and adventurous spirit of a truly exceptional naturalist and painter.
On The Wings of Heroes
Author: Richard PeckPublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440652570
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 162
Book Description
Davy Bowman’s dad looks forward to Halloween more than a kid, and Davy’s brother, Bill, flies B-17s. Davy adores these two heroes and tries his best to follow their lead, especially now. World War II has invaded Davy’s homefront boyhood. Bill has joined up, breaking their dad’s heart. It’s an intense, confusing time, and one that will spur Davy to grow up in a hurry. This is one of Richard Peck’s finest novels—a tender, unforgettable portrait of the World War II home front and a family’s enduring love.
The Girl With Borrowed Wings
Author: Rinsai RossettiPublisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101575441
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 254
Book Description
A stunningly written tale of an isolated girl and the shape-shifting boy who shows her what freedom could be--if only she has the courage to take it Controlled by her father and bound by desert, Frenenqer Paje’s life is tediously the same, until a small act of rebellion explodes her world and she meets a boy, but not just a boy--a Free person, a winged person, a shape-shifter. He has everything Frenenqer doesn’t. No family, no attachments, no rules. At night, he flies them to the far-flung places of their childhoods to retrace their pasts. But when the delicate balance of their friendship threatens to rupture into something more, Frenenqer must confront her isolation, her father, and her very sense of identity, breaking all the rules of her life to become free.
