Festive Bookshelf: Last Minute Stocking Filler Idea

Though the title may cause your fellow air travelers some concern when you get this book out to read on your next flight, Steve Ruffin's Flights of No Return is a fascinating page turner that will keep you riveted all the way to touchdown.

Unlike the authors of so many other collections of legendary aviation mysteries, Ruffin is himself a pilot and retired USAF Colonel who appears to have gone to painstaking lengths to ensure each event is chronicled in as much historic and technical accuracy as possible - itself a challenge for some of the more mysterious incidents. At the same time Ruffin manages to maintain a fast paced, engaging style as he delves into events as far ranging as the first humans to die in an aviation accident (French balloonists in 1785), to the tragic loss of adventurer Stephen Fossett in 2007. The epilogue also reviews the, as yet, unexplained disappearance of Malaysian Airlines MH370.

Well illustrated throughout, the book is split into four parts which roughly classify the events into 'When Luck Runs Out', 'Lapses. In Judgement', 'Criminal And Other Politically Incorrect Behavior' and 'Into The Twilight Zone.' While many of the subjects covered are well-known (the Hindenburg, Amelia Earhart, Glenn Miller, Space Shuttle Challenger, air pirate D B Cooper, and B-24 Lady Be Good and so on), many others may be unfamiliar to even the most widely read.

Lesser-known events covered in the book include the mystery arrival of an undamaged and unmanned US Navy blimp in Daly City, Calif., in 1942 after its crew had vanished on a routine patrol over the Pacific, and the disappearance in Alaska of a Cessna 310 carrying a senior Congressman in 1972. All-in-all Flights of No Return is a book that manages to be as entertaining as it is educational.

Flights Of No Return, by Steven A Ruffin

ISBN: 9780760347928

Publisher: Zenith Press