Airman S Odyssey

Three award-winning works of adventure, survival, and the early days of aviation from the celebrated author of The Little Prince, collected in one volume. Ranging from the northern skies of France to the South American Andes, this volume includes two memoirs and a novel, each informed by the lauded pilot and poet’s experiences as a pioneering aviator during World War II. Wind, Sand and Stars Recounting his early days flying airmail routes across the African Sahara, Saint-Exupéry explores the spiritual, philosophical, and physical wonders of navigating the passes of the Pyrenees, the peaks of the Andes, and the wasteland of the Libyan desert. This memoir, a National Book Award winner that was voted a National Geographic Top Ten Adventure Book of All Time, is “a beautiful book, a brave book, and a book that should be read against the confusion of this world” (The New York Times). Night Flight Overseeing night-mail flights in Buenos Aires, Riviere is a believer in remaining faithful to the mission and has trained his pilots to stave off the fear of death. But when he discovers that one of his planes is lost in a storm after flying out of Patagonia, both his authority and his beliefs will be challenged, in a novel that won France’s Prix Femina Award and was made into a classic film. Flight to Arras Saint-Exupéry’s memoir of a harrowing reconnaissance mission during the Battle of France in 1940—as one of only a handful of pilots who continued to fight in solidarity against the inevitable German invasion—was a recipient of the Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Aéro-Club de France. “Saint-Exupéry . . . blends adventure with reflection in a way few writers have.” —Richard Bach Translated by Lewis Galantière and Stuart Gilbert

Like Homer's Odyssey, An Airman's Odyssey tells the incredible story of a twenty-one year journey highlighted by one amazing adventure after another. The story you are about to read will take you on a fifty thousand mile journey from the East Coast of the United States to the West, across the largest ocean in the world five times, to a tropical island barely big enough to land a plane on. It will transport you deep inside a military program larger and more secret than any since the Manhattan Project, then to the foot of an erupting volcano, the second largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century. This is the story of invisible laser beams fired from jet airplanes at targets on the ground several miles away. It's also the story of senators and generals, FBI agents working with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations to prevent a major compromise of classified information, and of losing a friend, killed in the line of duty. It is a story of the love of family, and a deep appreciation for country. It's a voyage of self-discovery, and of going home, none of which would be possible without divine intervention at every critical turn. Just as when the gods intervened for and against Odysseus, the forces of fortune and adversity can be clearly seen in An Airman's Odyssey; but unlike Homer's Odyssey, this is no work of fiction. The stories are real, and the divine intervention is focused and purposeful, not cunning and divisive. It will take the reader, as it did the author, on a wonderful journey across the spectrum of human emotions, from laughter to tears, suspense to a sense of relief, as well as adventure and intrigue. So sit down, relax, and hang on, the journey is about to begin...

Flight to Arras is the memoir of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Written in 1942, it recounts his role in the French Air Force as pilot of a reconnaissance plane during the Battle of France in 1940. The book condenses months of flights into a single terrifying mission over the town of Arras. Saint-Exupéry was assigned to Reconnaissance Group II/33 flying the twin-engine Bloch MB.170. At the start of the war there were only fifty reconnaissance crews, of which twenty-three were in his unit. Within the first few days of the German invasion of France in May 1940, seventeen of the II/33 crews were sacrificed recklessly, he writes "like glasses of water thrown onto a forest fire".

Fasten your seatbelt to experience the spectacle and solitude of flying high in the Andes in this novel from the author of The Little Prince. No writer has equaled Saint-Exupéry in describing the perilous and poetic experience of flying, in submission to what he calls “those damn elemental divinities—night, day, mountain, sea and storm.” In this gripping, beautifully written novel inspired by his experience as a pilot in South America, he tells of the brave men who pilot night mail planes from Patagonia, Chile, and Paraguay to Argentina in the early days of commercial aviation. They are impelled to perform their routine acts of heroism by a steely chief named Rivière, whose extraordinary character is revealed through the dramatic events of a single night. Preface by André Gide. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. “The book stands out by reason of the quality of its style, the beauty of the passages in which flight is described better than it ever has been before, but more especially because of the emotions of the men of heroic mold.”—André Maurois, Saturday Review

Beautifully illustrated throughout, this riveting biography includes more than 100 black-and-white photos. On a May afternoon in 1943, an American military plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a sli

An Airman's Odyssey is the fascinating saga of the airline industry's early years and of the pioneer airmen who tamed America's last great wilderness--the sky. It is both a sweeping adventure story and an absorbing history of the evolution of flight and flight management, as witnessed by one of the industry's pioneer aviators, Walt Braznell. An Airman's Odyssey describes the airlines' origins and early development, dwelling at length upon that crucial and immensely colorful period between the awarding of the first air mail contracts in 1925 and the infamous "Airline Spoils Scandals" of 1934. The book goes on to chronicle the advent of the first great passenger liner, the DC-3; the tremendous advances in aviation technology and the boom in air travel during and immediately following World War II; and the reasons U.S. aircraft manufacturers and airlines lagged so far behind the British and the French in ushering in the Jet Age. Side by side with this fast-paced historical narrative, An Airman's Odyssey relates the story of a fledgling air mail pilot's education in aerial survival and his subsequent progress up the ranks to chief pilot and ultimately to vice president and director of American Airlines' six-thousand-man flight department. Along the way, the reader is introduced to a cast that includes a young (and surprisingly rambunctious) Charles A. Lindbergh; Missouri Air National Guard's beloved commander Phil Love; St. Louis's Robertson brothers; aviation novelist Ernie Gann; National Air Races champion Benny Howard; and dozens of other legendary figures of American aviation. A mixture of fact and legend, humor and tragedy, history and memoir--"with a set of operating instructions thrown in for good measure"--An Airman's Odyssey includes dozens of photographs of these airmen and the aircraft they flew, as well as illustrations and discourses on subjects ranging from aerial maneuvers (aerobatics) to the anatomy of a thunderstorm. An Airman's Odyssey should appeal to not only airmen and aviation enthusiasts but also any airline passenger who has ever given a passing thought to the human endeavor and personal sacrifice that, in scarcely more than a generation, transformed air travel from the most dangerous to the safest mode of mass transportation in the world.