The best books about flying

 

Paul Theroux once suggested "there is not much to say about airplane journeys".

• Michael Kerr, Travel writer

2 November 2014 • The Telegraph 

The Wild Blue Yonder: The Picador Book of Aviation
Ed. Graham Coster (Picador)

Virgin Galactic told its 700 would-be astronauts last month that its passenger rocket plane should get into space within the next few months. If it does, this excellent anthology might need updating. As it is, with everything from W B Yeats to Tom Wolfe by way of Biggles, it’s the perfect rejoinder to Paul Theroux’s assertion that “there is not much to say about airplane journeys”.
 

Beyond the Blue Horizon by Alexander Frater (Penguin)

Alexander Frater’s first flight, on December 31 1946, a few days before his ninth birthday, was on an Empire flying boat from Sydney to Fiji. In the Eighties, he set out to try to recapture the romance of it, following the Imperial Airways route from London to Brisbane in the Thirties. His booklet of tickets was “probably the largest ever issued on British Airways coupons”.
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