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Uffa Fox was the most celebrated and successful yacht designer in the world. Much more than a sailor and boat designer, he was an irrepressible extrovert and novel thinker, as well as a singer, musician, journalist, author, painter, sportsman, campaigner, controversial businessman and friend of royalty. In the years since his death his reputation has grown rather than diminished. This new biography, the first for fifty years, celebrates a Universal Man who not only changed his sport, his Island, and the lives of his friends, but also left an unfillable void. Such people are rare, and his story deserves to be remembered
The dawn of the jet age—in the late 1950s—forced legacy airlines to upgrade their fleets while selling off ‘big prop’ airliners which were still young in hours, but technically obsolete. It was an era in which scheduled airline services were strictly regulated and the smaller supplemental airlines struggled to survive. For those willing to buy or lease ‘nearly new’ aircraft, there were bargains aplenty. In the United States, travel clubs and affinity groups found loopholes in the CAB’s regulations allowing them to offer charters to their members at prices that were often less than half the scheduled fares. New clubs—sometimes loosely constituted and with minimal finance—sprang up and their brightly coloured aircraft were seen at airports across the continent. Michael Zoeller has minutely researched their history while creating hundreds of illustrations highlighting their varied and often inventive liveries.
When the young Dave Welch saw his first real Spitfire—part of a wartime ‘Wings for Victory’ appeal—it was the beginning of a lifelong love affair with aircraft and aviation. As a youngster, he rode his bike to airfields, and Battle of Britain airshows, where he began photographing and recording the many aircraft types he saw. He later joined the RAF, and served in photoreconnaissance units in Britain, Cyprus, and Kenya. It was there that he decided he wanted to be a navigator, although the route to qualification would be long and arduous. He would later fly with many civilian airlines, including British Eagle, Britannia Airways, British Midland Airways and Martinair. He also served as a navigating officer in the Royal New Zealand Air Force, before qualifying as an airline pilot. Dave’s long career spanned two air forces, numerous airlines, more than a hundred aircraft types, and many thousands of hours as a navigator, pilot, and instructor. His heartwarming story, North Star, gives a unique insight into the peaks and troughs of civil and military aviation in the years following World War Two.
When five-year-old Bob Williams flew to Berlin with his family in a noisy, freezing Avro Tudor, his mother was in tears, but he thought it was the most exciting event of his young life. Having been bitten by the aviation bug, he found there was no cure and made up his mind he would always work with aircraft. Starting as an apprentice engineer with British Eagle, he experienced the first of several redundancies when they folded in 1968. Dan-Air sponsored him for his commercial pilot’s licence, and he gained his command on their Boeing 737s before being made redundant once more. Over the decades that followed he would fly for ten different airlines, only two of which have survived. He rose to the rank of Chief Pilot, and the story of his career is, in many ways, the story of a remarkable industry that flourished in the years following World War Two but experienced many failures and setbacks along the way. Born to Fly is essential reading for those who want to understand the remarkable growth and periodic failures of Britain’s airlines, or those who seek only a good read and the heartwarming story of a boy who lived his dreams.
Now in two volumes, Philip Hogge's popular anthologies of tales about flying's golden age. Although fiction, all of Philip's stories are based on fact, and relate to real situations experienced by him or his colleagues. If you have ever wondered how it felt to be in the cockpit of a BOAC passenger jet in the mid to late 20th century, then Philip Hogge's fact-based stories will take you there with all the colour, detail and human drama that you could wish for. Let one of Britain's most senior airline captains tell you what it was really like to fly for an iconic British airline in the final years of flying's Golden Age. Meet the pilots, engineers, stewards, stewardesses and endless characters of Philip's long career.
Revised and expanded, the second edition of Alan Lester's acclaimed analysis of changing attitudes to Empire. 'Deny and Disavow tackles the deliberate misrepresentations of recent calls for recognition and reform made by Black Lives Matter and other campaigning organisations, as well as the clear majority of historians working in the field. Lester intersperses an admirably dispassionate anatomy of the culture warriors’ various strategies to distance Britain from its own history with punchy ‘snapshot’ accounts of some of the key events and figures that are now, apparently, controversial ... I would recommend this book to all general readers interested in the current culture wars and the imperial history behind them.' Dr Ryan Hanley, University of Exeter.
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