A bit florid for my taste, I swear the author doesn't give you any clear idea of the time period of the book at the beginning. Just cockpit this, steely gaze that. ( )

The author has such a descriptive way of writing that you easily inhabit the various cockpits and join his crew. i haven't read such immersive writing in a long time. ( )

A gripping and fascinating account of flying before GPS and before even radio beacons. The best book on flying ever; every pilot I've spoken to has read it. ( )

Very wordy, can skip paragraphs or even pages and still get the tale.Could not hold my interest. ( )

A fantastic pilot's memoir. The stories are unbelievable. Dealing with icing, flying to Reykjavik, rescuing a downed crew in the Canadian wilderness, flying the Hump to China,… "Did you know we grounded every DC-4 in the world because of you?" The descriptions and the characterizations are also good.

"Even as I watch the ice accumulates… It builds upon itself, decreasing the size of the opening like a closing iris until it is merely a black hole, hardly more than the size of a dollar… Our engines are simply suffocating. Something must remove the ice before it closes the mouths entirely… By backfiring the engines a tongue of flame spurts from the air scoops. It is not the flame but the force of air from the bowels of the engine which knocks away the closing ice."

"The only way the true speed of an aeroplane may be visually appreciated is to fly it close to a relatively stationary surface. In barnstorming days we frequently sought this same exhilaration by skimming over the fields and trees, even following the contours of hills as closely as we dared. It was, at least, a stimulating prelude to disaster which was all too frequently the end result. Such gay foolishness in an airliner is, of course, unthinkable, but the same effect can be achieved by finding a flat-topped deck of cloud and flying along its surface until the bottom arc of the propellers slice into it. This is a harmless diversion and when, as now, a moon illuminates a great mattress of vapour, the effect is intoxicating." ( )