Pen & Sword Publishing

Trailblazers: Test Pilots in Action The Most Frightening Moments of the World's Elite

by  Christopher Hounsfield

Reviewed By  Ned Ricks, IPMS# 36013

MSRP: $39.95 ISBN: 978-184415748-8 Review copy furnished by Casemate Publishing: Website: www.casematepublishing.com Reading this collection of test pilot first-person stories gives a whole new meaning to "Risky Business." Unlike the teen movie, these are real-life men and women who climb into airplanes in the full expectation that something will go wrong and their aviation skills and knowledge will be taxed to the limit. Christopher Hounsfield contacted test pilots and collected their stories. Some of their names I had never heard of; some I knew of only by the aircraft with which they were associated. (e.g. Alex Henshaw - the Spitfire.) All of them had interesting tales to tell that never hit the newsstands. For instance, I didn't know that the special fuel developed by Shell for the U2 included components of their bug spray product and that the priority spy plane program caused a nation-wide shortage of the pest killer in the 1950s. Also, the U2 has a very small flight safety envelope of only about 5 to ten knots difference between stall speed and fatally too fast. In addition to being gutsy aviators, these test pilots are also engineers so some of the explanations of what went wrong were over my head. An example "…center bearing panel in the crankcase by 0.01 to 00.012 inches." There are "driving bevels" and "skew gears" references that baffled me, but the flying stories are still compelling. While the writing styles generally range from terse, "nothing-but-the-facts," to conversational, "there-I-was-at-30,000-feet...," if you have an interest in aviation, you can pass some entertaining and illuminating hours reading this book. Thanks to Casemate (www.casematepublishing.com) for providing the sample copy.