Glacier Pilot

You may have to scratch a bit to find this book, but if you have flying in your blood and a love of both airplanes and stories of adventure, this is a book that is well worth looking for. During half of the year I am a docent at the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, AZ and while chatting with a fellow docent who is a retired Delta Airlines pilot, we got talking about adveturesome flying and he remarked that he had found a book about early flying in Alaska at a yard sale or some such place and said he would loan it to me if I was interested. I am delighted that he did as it provided me with a wonderful history of what it was like to have been flying in Alaska long before it became a state or even an area where flight was regulated. The name of the book and the central figure in it is Bob Reeve, a pilot who took his flying abilities from South America to Alaska and ended up over the years as the owner of Reeve Alutian Airways and a giant in the history of Alaskan bush pilots. As one who learned to fly in the mid-1970's, what Reeve and his fellow bush pilots did, rather routinely in the 1930's, flying in unbelievably difficult conditions in fairly basic airplanes without navigation aids, radios or the like is the stuff of legend. Not only were many of them accomplished pilots, but they had to understand the mechanics of their engines as well and how to accomodate the harsh and severe conditions of the long and arduous Alaskan winter. Beth Day has recounted these years from the early 1930's into the 1950's with a storyteller's talent and a fine understanding of the suject matter. Alaska is still the last frontier in this oh so modern 21st Century and nothing points out the fact that it has held that title for a very long time better than this book. I promise you that if you can find a copy, you will be richly rewarded.

i long, diverse, and particularly fascinating career in aviation, well told. i especially liked the accounts of bob's hands-on flying: hair raising stories of flying the mail in south america, and later, scary tales of pioneer ski flying in/around valdez. i checked the book out from the library, and was suprised to find an signed inscription by reeve himself.