The Sky Beyond, a Thrilling Personal Chronicle of Pioneering Aviation as Lived By the First Man to Fly the Pacific from Australia to America by Taylor, Sir Gordon

Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1963. US first edition, hard bound in dj, 6 x 8 1/2, VG/VG condition ( light dj edge wear), x, 370 pages, end paper maps, illus., index.----------------------------------This is a rich personal chronicle of flying during the years 1916 to 1951, written by Australia's brilliant pioneer aviator, Sir Gordon Taylor. The author's first aircraft was a little Sopwith Scout fighter which he flew on the British front in France in 1917. Twenty-five years later, in 1942, he flew Liberator bombers and other aircraft across the Atlantic for the R.A.F. — one of the few pilots to fly actively in both World Wars. But the heart of this aviator is in pioneering aviation. In The Sky Beyond he tells of his perilous exploratory flights — many of them in the great Catalina flying boats — across the Tasman Sea and the Indian and Pacific Oceans during the 1930's and 1940's. As recently as 1951 he commanded Frigate Bird II on its historic flight from Australia to South America and back.-----------------------------------------------------------Such flights were as dangerous and demanding as they were compelling. On the first West-East crossing of the Pacific from Australia to the United States in 1934, the single engined Lockheed Altair of which Sir Gordon Taylor was navigator plummeted uncontrollably in a spin of over 10,000 feet. Even more appalling was a 1935 trans-Tasman flight during which he repeatedly had to crawl out onto the outboard engine bracing struts of the Fokker Southern Cross and, using an improvised container, transfer oil from the dead starboard engine to the failing port engine!