The Flying Boat That Fell to Earth
A Lost World of Air Travel and Africa
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Safe Haven Books
Published:10th Jan '19
£9.99
Available to order, but very limited on stock - if we have issues obtaining a copy, we will let you know.
Half boat, half aeroplane, taking off in a thrilling tumult of spray, the flying boat was the journey of a lifetime, Imperial Airways’ legendary Empire boats flying up the Nile in nightly hops and alighting on lakes and in harbours all the way down to South Africa. But in 1939 the Empire boat Corsair came down in fog on a tiny river in the Belgian Congo and, through an epic salvage operation, gave its name to a new village in an obscure backwater of Central Africa. The Flying Boat That Fell to Earth, re-published with a new Afterword, tells the story of this amazing adventure, and seeks out, from Alaska to the Bahamas, the very last places on earth where it was still possible to catch a flying boat.
'A fascinating and strangely inspiring story' William Boyd; 'Beautifully told' Jeremy Clarkson; `Part history, part travelogue, part essay, it is a hybrid like the machines it celebrates, and like them, it gets triumphantly airborne. . . Some of the best reflective writing about nostalgia that I have ever read’ Francis Spufford, Evening Standard; `The extraordinary story of the Corsair is a good yarn, and yarns are as hard to come by in commercial flying these days as leather upholstery and hulls rubbed with beeswax’ The Times; `A proper piece of literature, beautifully written and grabbing one’s attention from the first lines … The description of people and places is the sort of thing you once would have expected from writers like Norman Lewis and Eric Newby - a wonderful read in its own right and journalism of the highest standard’ Pilot magazine
ISBN: 9780993291166
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
304 pages