What is better than a great biography about a legendary pilot? How about the biographies of three legendary pilots all rolled into one.
The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight by Winston Groom is that book. Through exhaustive and thorough research, Groom brings to life the lives of these three famous aviators. Often told as separate stories, their lives in aviation are actually intertwined.
Rickenbacker‘s WWI exploits and contributions to aviation after the war and during WWII, along with surviving two plane crashes and being lost at sea for three weeks. Lindbergh‘s contributions before his famous trans-Atlantic flight and after it, along with transforming the effectiveness of the P-38 in the Pacific Theater and research into the effects of high altitude flying. Doolittle’s famous raid on Tokyo, but less talked about his contributions to instrument flight, becoming the first person to take off, fly and land an airplane off instruments with no reference outside the cockpit.
These points only scratch the surface of the exploits told in The Aviators. Groom seamlessly weaves their lives together providing new insights and information even for those who have already read biographies and autobiographies of these men.
The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight
