To Mike Wynne—
who suggested this flight
of fancy and fact
“I think it’s too bad when aviation movies depend for their excitement on plane wrecks and lost fliers and all that sort of thing. Perhaps that’s good drama but it certainly isn’t modern aviation.”
Although the historical incidents in this novel are portrayed more or less accurately (as much as the passage of time, and contradictory source material, will allow), fact, speculation, and fiction are freely mixed here; historical personages exist side by side with composite characters and wholly fictional ones — all of whom act and speak at the author’s whim.