Air Warriors: The Inside Story of the Making of a Navy Pilot - Softcover

Waller, Douglas C.

3.76

86 ratings by Goodreads

9780440235316: Air Warriors: The Inside Story of the Making of a Navy Pilot

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0440235316 ISBN 13: 9780440235316

Publisher: Dell, 1999

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Follows the grueling training of a group of male and female Navy Top Gun pilot trainees over two years, documenting their aerial dogfights from the passenger seat and their physical and mental challenges

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Douglas C. Waller is a lecturer, author, and veteran correspondent. Before joining Newsweek in 1988, he worked as a legislative assistant for Senator William Proxmire and Representative Edward J. Markey. From 1994 to 2007, Waller served in Time magazine’s Washington bureau as a correspondent. He has authored or coauthored nine books including The Commandos: The Inside Story of America’s Secret Soldiers and Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage. Waller earned a BA in English from Wake Forest University and an MA in urban administration from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, Judy.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Varied views from the cockpits of Navy planes and the ultracompetitive flight schools that process the best-trained flyers in the world. Waller (The Commandos, 1994), a Time national-security correspondent, was allowed to participate in the long, intense, and risky programs to develop pilots for the navys most up-to-date planes over a two-year period, and here he presents sketches of the young students lives. Waller notes that modern navy training features safety, and very few mistakes by the students are allowed. (In the 1950s, the navy air wings had about 2,000 major air accidents that killed up to 600 pilots every year compared with about two dozen accidents a year today.) Instructors are expert, seasoned veterans who are strict but helpful teachers. Waller takes us along on hair-raising maneuvers and dogfights, and introduces us to young pilots such as Tuba, a musician-turned-aviator, and Rosie, the first female in her squadron. Waller thus also takes us inside the social norms of a bureaucratized, sexually integrated force. The Tailhook sex scandal had a major impact on the world of navy pilots. The author describes how the old breed of cocky fighter pilots became almost extinct after the shock of Tailhook. Hundreds of pilots resigned, and about half of the vacancies were filled by so called ``corporate management types who achieved high marks in college. Waller writes that fraternization between officers and enlisted men and women is now punished more severely than ever, and everyone in the navy is obliged to take several sexual harassment courses. Waller reports on life onboard the carrier Eisenhower experiment with 400 women and 4,600 men on the first ``co-ed cruise.'' An eye-opening account of how our new vastly reduced, gentrified navy works, short of recruits, given more global peacetime missions than ever by civilian officials concerned with the military as an equal-opportunity employer. -- Copyright �1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.