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a story told with empathy and humor?and with searing honesty that will resonate with every pilot who remembers the first take off, the first landing, the first solo.
Algonquin Books
September 2005
288 pages
ISBN: 156512426X
Hardcover
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Fiction
When Clyde Edgerton was four years old, his mother took him
to a local airport to see the airplanes. Eighteen years
later, she would take him to the same airport to catch a
plane to Texas for Air Force pilot training. She’d been his
first passenger when he got his aviator’s license. She’d
supported his decision to join the Air Force. All the same,
she wished he’d kept up his piano lessons instead. But Truma Edgerton’s only son had fallen in love with
flying, and had fallen hard. His plan was to pilot the
newest, sleekest, fastest aircraft available. The first
time he soloed in a jet, he felt “a strange pride and
power.” By then, the only access to the cockpits of fighter
jets was via the war in Vietnam. So he spent a year flying
combat reconnaissance over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and he
won the Distinguished Flying Cross. Back at home, he took up another passion—writing. By and
by, he bought himself his own airplane, a Piper Super
Cruiser that he named Annabelle. Now, thirty years after
Vietnam, Clyde Edgerton looks back at his youthful passion
for flying, at the joy he took in mastering it, at the
exhilaration—and lingering anguish—of combat flight. Solo is a story told with empathy and humor—and with
searing honesty that will resonate with every pilot who
remembers the first take off, the first landing, the first
solo. For those of us who always choose the window seat,
it’s a thrilling story to experience vicariously.
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