Your destination for aviation "prop" culture conversation.
about the book
Air-Minded
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In 1939, America watches Europe enter the war of the airplane. For two men bound by a shared passion for flight, that same passion pulls them toward opposite fates. One goes to war to defend democracy. The other is already at war with something inside himself.
From a swamp-adjacent cow town in Florida, John Paul Riddle turns 1,800 raw recruits into elite Royal Air Force bomber crews — work that earns him a place in the British Empire's honors list. In the skies over Indiana and Missouri, self-taught pilot Earnest Pletch is a headline-making joyrider in a stolen Piper Cub. When he kills his flight instructor at 5,000 feet — covered by a young wire reporter named Walter Cronkite — he becomes America's first mid-air murderer and skyjacker. Air-Minded is a richly researched cultural history of the era when flight was still a miracle and a menace at once — when the same skies that made heroes could just as easily make headlines for all the wrong reasons.
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