Others may cite Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Richard Bach, Ernest Gann, or even Captain W. E. Johns, but my favorite author is Bill “the Gun” Gunston, OBE. His writing certainly fueled my obsession with airplanes. As technical editor of Flight magazine for many years, Gunston had an extraordinary command of the science and engineering that were crucial to his brief. But it’s the way that he’s able to bring his subject to life—and explain—through simply brilliant writing that so hooked me. I’m not making any claims for this list being comprehensive, but all the following books made an impression on me.
Bill Gunston
OK, they sound a bit dry, but all three of these books are brilliant. Nobody else combines technical know-how, strong storytelling, irreverence, and an eye for the absurd like Bill Gunston.
Pierre Clostermann
From Spitfires to Hawker Tempests, this is a fabulously rich Second World War memoir by a Frenchman who flew with the RAF. It hasn’t aged a bit.
Len Deighton
A brilliant fictional account of a single RAF Lancaster raid against Germany. An equally good radio dramatization is also available.
Robert Mason
This memoir by a US Army helicopter pilot is possibly the best book to come out of Vietnam, and certainly my favorite.
Graham Coster
A beautifully written and personal exploration of the lost world of the Imperial Airways Empire flying boats. Entirely coincidentally, I used to work with Graham at Our Price records when I was 18.
James Hamilton-Paterson
Another hymn to the past, but this celebration of Britain’s post-war aircraft industry is suffused with incredulousness and anger at what was so carelessly thrown away.
Robert Prest
An evocative and detailed insight into flying Phantoms for the RAF in the 1970s. It remains much admired, although it has been pointed out that you wouldn’t, from reading it, know that the Phantom carried a navigator.
Patrick Bishop
An extremely readable account of the Battle of Britain by a distinguished war correspondent displaying great control of his material.
Geoffrey Wellum
Written, then kept in a drawer for twenty years, before finally seeing the light of day in 2002, this book became an instant classic.
Robert Gandt
Gets under the skin of the world’s fastest motor sport: the Unlimited Class at the annual Reno Air Races.
Roald Dahl
Obviously much more well known for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, and many more classic children’s books, Dahl was also a fighter pilot and ace. In this volume he writes about his time in the RAF. What a great combination.
Derek Robinson
While not Robinson’s most well-known book, this one is my favorite. It’s a rich, substantial, and satisfying flying novel set during the Second World War in North Africa. And it’s chock-full of SAS action and strafing Curtiss Tomahawks.
Nick Cook
This investigation into deep-classified US Black defense programs, secret Nazi technology, and the search for anti-gravity should be neither readable nor credible, but it’s both. A completely fascinating book by a respected former aviation correspondent for Jane’s.
William Langewiesche
A really stunning collection of aviation writing from an experienced pilot who also happens to be one of America’s finest reporters.
Warren Ellis, Chris Weston, and Laura DePuy
A graphic novel that has the feel of a labor of love. Spitfires to the stars, it’s a hymn to what might have been, a richly imagined, lushly drawn account of the British post-war conquest of space. You just don’t want to know how it’s funded.
Andrew Smith
You’ll never look at the moon the same way again after reading this fantastically engaging quest to meet the nine remaining moonwalkers.
Gary Pomerantz
An extraordinary piece of reporting that painstakingly and movingly re-creates the 1993 commuter plane crash in the USA. Published in the week of 9/11, no one noticed it.
Joshua Cooper Ramo
A full-on adrenaline rush. This is a high-octane, in-your-face account of flying competitive aerobatics.
Sebastian Junger
More or less everyone’s read this or seen the movie, but it’s somehow more well known for the loss of the trawler Andrea Gail than for the jaw-dropping account of the USAF’s unbelievably heroic attempt to rescue her crew.
Derek Wood
This book had a sort of magnetic hold on me as a boy. It tells the story of all the what-ifs and could-have-beens produced by the post-war British aviation industry. Rather like Goddess, Antony Summers’s biography of Marilyn Monroe, you hope, every time you read it, that it will end differently. Heartbreaking.
Christopher Robbins
Air America is the author’s best-known book, but this one, about a maverick band of brothers flying armed piston-engined trainers in Laos during the Vietnam war is my favorite.
Tom Wolfe
This stone-cold classic account of the early years of the US space program is absolutely seminal. If I had to pick just one book here, I’d probably vote for this one.
Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts
A dense, brilliantly researched and grippingly written account of the USAAF’s Second World War atom bomb attack against Hiroshima.
Robert K. Wilcox
This is the real story of Top Gun. With great research and vivid writing, it’s an authoritative account of the birth of the US Navy’s Fighter Weapons School.
Commander “Sharkey” Ward
Opinionated, bloody-minded, and graceless, this gripping memoir by the boss of 801 Naval Air Squadron is still the best account of the air war for the Falklands.
Jan Mark
A children’s book that, as a boy, I thought could have been written especially for me. It tells the story of a friendship between two boys against the backdrop of the much-loved Lightning’s replacement by the Jaguar.
James Goodson
This book has definitely stood the test of time. It’s a still-fresh account by an American ace, who, after being torpedoed on his way home at the beginning of the war, joined an RAF Eagle Squadron.
