Flying the Edge: The Making of Navy Test Pilots

A very thorough, well-written book about Test Pilot School, where daring and usually cocky pilots are turned into Engineers/Pilots. George Wilson spent a whole year with Class 100 at TPS and describes all they had to go through in breath-taking detail.Mr. Wilson even describes the history behind the School and explains the struggles encountered by the first aviators testing airplanes.A definite buy for the military airplane enthusiast.

As a Navy engineer working at Pax, a graduate of the Navy's Test Pilot School and a person intimately involved in the flight testing of the Navy's premier fighter aircraft, I read this book with great interest. Several of my friends were mentioned in his previous book, 'Supercarrier' and I knew several others who attended TPS while Mr. Wilson was there. This book captured the very essence of life at Pax without the embellishment typically found in storytelling. The lives of the engineers and test pilots seem simply ordinary to those who work at Pax, yet George Wilson finds a way to capture the flavor and excitement of our work and present it in an incredibly readable and accurate way. This was an excellent book and I recommend it to all who have an interest in aviation and especially, the field of flight test

Wilson is a former reporter with Av Week who later moved to the Wash. Post. In an earlier book, "Supercarrier," he wrote about his experiences during a year-long cruise aboard the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy. In this book, Wilson follows a class of students through the Navy's Test Pilot School at Pax River, Md. George is good at making the technical accessible to even liberal arts majors. And there's enough detail to make sophisticated readers happy. Wilson does a pretty good job capturing the personalities of the modern naval aviators who are attending the school. There is adequate material about their off-base lives, family, etc. For drama, Wilson describes several major accidents -- one of which led to the suicide of a senior TPS officer. As a case study of how the aircraft test system works (or doesn't) Wilso focuses on the tests of the Goshawk TA-45 trainer. Finally, Wilson includes a brief chapter on the Tailhook scandal, including a verbatim reprint of Paula Coughlin's affidavit to the NIS