The Golden Years of Flying—As We Remember
is the legacy of an earlier day in aviation history, recorded by one of
the pilots who shared this experience and wrote down his fellow pilots'
stories. Captain Tex Searle corresponded with and interviewed several
retired DC-3 pilots from the old Frontier Airlines days, and brought all
their tales together in one place for a vivid historical account.
Flying the Rocky Mountain region, Frontier Airlines' pilots achieved
the best safety record in civil aviation—a record based on the most
stringent measure of the number of takeoffs and landings while flying in
extreme conditions. Frontier Airlines flew from 1946 to 1986. In her
early days, crews hand-flew DC-3s over the high Rockies, in and out of
small airports hidden deep in mountain canyons, with approaches often
referred to as “black holes” due to their almost ominous darkness and
lack of reliable visual references. Relating their first-hand experience
of flying through “tornado alley” without radar, flying in canyons of
sodden clouds while lightning displays an explosion of highlighted
pageantry throughout the heavens, the pilot storytellers in The Golden Years of Flying
invite you into the cockpit for a lighter dimension, too—you will
surely enjoy the hi-jinks and hangar tales of their shared experiences.
As a retired FAL captain himself, the author points out that “flying
the DC-3 was just about the best thing that could happen to a man.”
Part Number ASAGYF
ISBN 9781560277088
ISBN 9781560277088
