One man's disappearance could signal the beginning of World War Three.Group Captain Gavin Gallagher, after a spectacular career as an airman, was the Commanding Officer of the most powerful nuclear rocket station in the world. Until he vanishes, without a trace.He left the Zeus launching pads to return home to his wife and never arrived. From the Provost Marshal's office, Wing Commander Henderson is tasked with investigatin...

Investigations into the causes of aircraft accidents have for decades focused on what happened and who did it - very rarely Why? It is the question Why? that David Beaty has addressed here, fighting the misnomer of 'pilot error' and propounding that the cause should be sought deeper inside human beings who make apparently simple human errors.

In the unpredictable maelstrom of war, heroes can come from the unlikeliest places...Malta, 1942 a thousand miles from friends, isolated, besieged, and slowly being starved into surrenderInto that hopeless situation fly two Wellington aircraft equipped with long-range radar. One is captained by a dedicated, veteran RAF pilot. The other by Peter Forrester, a hastily trained, carefree twenty-one-year-old.Their role is to find enemy co...

From World War to World War, the spirit of comradeship never dies.Autumn, 1940. The battered RAF 13 Squadron are stationed at Marshfield airfield, once home to the American 96th Squadron who lost their lives on the Hindenburg Line.Jack Horner and Ginger Johnson are appalled when they are assigned to Peter Maddox, a notoriously inept pilot. Though they fear for their lives, Maddox, despite his total lack of ...

A battle of nerves between a British squadron-leader and a German sea-captain.Deep in a Norwegian fjord hides the German merchant-cruiser Groningen. Squadron-leader Guy Strickland knows it is there, but Military Intelligence refuses to take his word for granted.He leads his exhausted squadron into the air in order to take the vital photographic evidence but only his plane returns.A maverick and a brilliant flyer, Strickland becomes ...

Four stunning full cast dramatisation of WWII flying ace, David Beaty’s most exciting novelsListen now to this thrilling collection of four dramas from the master of the genre, David Beaty. These vintage dramatisations will have you on the edge of your seat and transport you to a bygone era when aviation was a new, thrilling and sometimes deadly world. If you are a fan of Jack Higgins or R.D. Wingfield, then you will love these adventures from a master of suspense....

The smash-hit bestseller about the world's worst air crashes and the disaster detectives who pick through the wreckage to find out why they happened - now fully revised and updated, with 30% new material.From the early tragedies of the Comet and the DC10 to the modern-day horror of the Concorde catastrophe in Paris and the mysterious loss of an Air France Airbus over the Atlantic, Faith painstakingly recreates the accidents, explains what went wrong and discusses how they can be pre...

As with the Air France Flight 447 tragedy, much of the time air crashes are a confluence of events; a cascade of bad luck, bad decisions, inappropriate airline company policy, the failure of aviation regulators, and sometimes insufficient training, or various combinations of all five.But why?Seconds to Disaster will demonstrate that part of that bad luck is often aided by the airline industry's own endless and aggressive pursuit of bottom-line profit. It contributes to a cre...

Emergency is a collection of true stories about events where disaster seems imminent. Yet each situation is concluded without loss of life thanks to the skill of the pilots and their crews, whose bravery and resourcefulness have earned them well-deserved commendations. Written by a British Airways First Officer, Stanley Stewart, who has spoken at first hand with the pilots and crews involved in all the incidents recorded here, the book offers a unique insight into what really happened: not...

On 12th April 1981 a revolutionary new spacecraft blasted off from Florida on her maiden flight. NASA’s Space Shuttle Columbia was the most advanced flying machine ever built – the high watermark of post-war aviation development. A direct descendant of the record-breaking X-planes the likes of which Chuck Yeager had tested in the skies over the Mojave Desert, Columbia was a winged rocket plane, the size of an airliner, capable of flying to space and back before be...

"Sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight," our pilots still intone. But who are they kidding?In Full Upright and Locked Position, former FAA chief counsel and senior aviation policy official Mark Gerchick unravels the unseen forces and little-known facts that have reshaped our air travel experience since September 11, 2001.With wry humor and unique insight, Gerchick takes us past the jargon, technicalities, and all-is-well platitudes to expose the new normal of air t...

Originally published by Wm. Morrow in 1995, SKYGODS is the story of Pan American World Airways from its meteoric ascent to its plunge to extinction. Pan Am blazed the way across the world's oceans with its magnificent Clipper ships, launched the first international jet service, was the first to fly the behemoth 747, was the lead customer for America's SST and the Concorde, and was even taking reservations for the first commercial flights to the moon.SKYGODS is the true story of an A...