Zane wrote:All I wanted to read when I was 14 was a Penthouse magazine, even though I did want to be a pilot.

You read them?? I didn't. I just looked at the pictures and............ oh, never mind.

My suggestion would be one of the many Nevil Shute books, but perhaps that would generally be for a slightly older young adult. Depends on the kid... A lot of them definitely had an influence on me to seriously consider flying.

Swindler beat me to it, but I MUST give a hearty recommendation for A Gift of Wings by Richard Bach.

"Changed my life" would be the understatement of the millennium.

I finally got to thank him in person for it at Arlington last year, over 30 years after it grabbed me and realigned my life forever.

Wager with the wind (Don Sheldon Story) really grabbed me- still does.

Richard Bach was a real kick as well. Grew out of it pretty quick, but it was nice while it lasted.

Wings over Alaska is a great one about Eielson.

Autobiography from Lindbergh was fascinating, albeit disturbing towards the end.

Fly the Biggest Piece Back- a nice work about the Johnson Flying Service days...some folks I know/knew figured prominently...a real hoot with great footage. Pics of Jenny's and Travelairs happily parked on the same strips.

A few of these, if the young person is a reader, will have him or her camping under a wing in their dreams for sure.

Have him read this:

http://www.faa.gov/data_research/accide ... nary_data/


Then if he still wants to ba a pilot he'll know what NOT to do.

Hi all;

I do not think that you need to be 14 years old still to enjoy.
Having said that; I just put Flight of Passage: A Memoir on my Amazon wish list for my Kindle.

Greg

A hardcopy of the FAA's Airplane Flying Handbook is pretty good with lots of illustrations.

Nizina wrote:You might want to try "Flight of Passage: A Memoir" by Rinker Buck. It is the true story of two early teenage age brothers that rebuild a J3 Cub and then fly it from Pennsylvania to California. It is really about their cutting their strings from their overbearing flying father, but it is a good read and filled with flying adventure that a young person can identify with.

Although I had flown for many years before I read Flight of Passage, it reminded me of what flying was all about. It fueled my dream to purchase a small plane and fly it across the country which I did this year.

I have given copies of this book to individuals from all walks of life and they all loved it.

I like to periodically update this section of BCP: http://www.backcountrypilot.org/knowled ... ng-library

What I do is just turn around and pick a book from my bookshelf in my office, look it up on Amazon, and add the link/image. I've always wanted a good list of bush flying reading like this, so this is the start. While Flight of Passage isn't bush flying per se, it's still in my top 5 reads of all time just because it's so damned relevant to what I like to do.

BTW those links out to Amazon in our Bush Flying Library net BCP $0.50 or something if you buy after clicking the link. It's the Amazon Affiliate program. Chump change, but it's something.

Definitely CloudDancer's books! I gave them to my boys when they were around 14, and they devoured them. Both boys took them to school and shared the stories with their friends. My youngest even shared some of Cloudie's descriptive forms with the nuns. The "breasticles" reference in particular.

You can add my votes to Flight of Passage and anything by Gann. One other great read that isn't on this list is "Chasing The Glory" by Michael Parfit. It is a fabulous true story of flying across the country, retracing the celebratory route Lindberg took in a small plane to promote aviation after his transatlantic flight. It is an amazing read that is full of little anecdotes about flying, and some of the odd but interesting places you can see from the air. It is the book that got me interested in long distance flying.

I did notice that most of the books in this thread were written a long time ago. Why don't we have any hot, new aviation authors?

One more offering is the biography titled: "Lincoln Beachey, the Man Who Owned the Sky" by Frank Marrero. It is the biography of the first American to do a loop in an aeroplane. It has some great old pictures of Lincoln racing Barney Oldfield around a race track. Barney was in a car and Lincoln was in his Curtis pusher biplane. Lincoln would drag his wingtip on the ground to kick up dust into Barney's face during the race. It's a great look at the early days of aviation when most pilots were young.

Here's the link to Chasing the Glory:
http://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Glory-Parfit/dp/0025947311/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381286649&sr=1-1&keywords=chasing+the+glory


And here's the link to the Lincoln Beachey biography:

http://www.amazon.com/Lincoln-Beachey-Man-Who-Owned/dp/0942087127/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381286126&sr=1-1&keywords=Lincoln+Beachey%2C+the+man+who+owned+the+sky

PA12_Pilot wrote:Definitely CloudDancer's books! I gave them to my boys when they were around 14, and they devoured them. Both boys took them to school and shared the stories with their friends. My youngest even shared some of Cloudie's descriptive forms with the nuns. The "breasticles" reference in particular.

Now how can ya possibly go wrong with a guy from Kotzebue with a bag over his head!!!!!



Gump

Border Pilot by MW Bourne. He can actually read it online here:

http://borderpilot.com/

On an equally important but disturbing note, those shirts look remarkably similar, kinda creeping me out.

There is a pretty strict dress code for old Kotz Sled drivers.

Gump

Is this kid interested in bush flying or just flying anything or go fast stuff or what?

Anyway,
Tall timber pilots old out of publication but great read about Johnson bros flying developing fire fighting.
several books by Jimmy "Midnight" Anderson, great stories of flying in Canada;
The Cannibal Qween by Coonts
The worlds strangest aircraft

We all have our favorites, for various reasons. My first flight instructor insisted that I read Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull because of the emphasis on the joy of flight. I followed that with others of Bach's books, Stranger to the Ground and Biplane. Bach's style is easy reading, and it obviously shows his own joy of flight. I think a teen would enjoy any of them.

I've enjoyed all of Ernie Gann's books that I've read, especially The High and the Mighty, Fate Is the Hunter, and Island In the Sky. What is neat about them is that they are real, based on Gann's experiences as an early airliner pilot. His style emphasizes the excitement of aviation (although we all know that airline flying is thousands of hours of boredom punctuated by a few moments of shear terror--oh wait, that describes a lot of flying, right? )

I had the privilege of meeting Don Sheldon in early 1973--he gave a talk at one of our "safety meetings" at the EDF Aeroclub, so of course I bought and enjoyed his biography, Wager With the Wind when it was first published. I bought it the year after I left the USAF, and it was disheartening to later learn that Sheldon had died of cancer the following year. I took away from that meeting that he was a quiet, unassuming sort of man, and what I really appreciated was that he didn't talk down to us fledgling pilots, although his piloting skills were the stuff of legend. Any kid would enjoy reading about his life, I think.

I'm currently reading Rinker Buck's Flight of Passage. I agree that it also appears to be a great book for encouraging a youngster, especially since it's about youngsters--kind of like the Hardy Boys of aviation.

There are so many aviation books, and most of them remind us all why we fly. Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Night Flight and Wind, Sand, and Stars are beautiful expressions of why we fly, although they may have a little too much romanticism for a 14 year old boy--a 14 year old girl would love them, though.

Just my 2 cents.

Cary

30 seconds over Tokyo.

Jake

Moondog's Academy of the Air and Other Disasters.

-DP