This is the story of a man from early twentieth century rural Cork who rose to the heights of the RAF and excelled as a major figure in international rugby in the 1920s and 1930s.
Alarmstart South completes Patrick Eriksson's Alarmstart trilogy on Second World War German fighter pilots, detailing their experiences in the Mediterranean theatre (1941-1944), and during the closing stages of the war over Normandy, Norway and Germany (1944-1945).
This is the fascinating true story behind one of the key reasons that RAF Fighter Command saw such success in the Second World War and emerged victorious from the Battle of Britain - the incredible training school that transformed young men from inexperienced pilots into some of the finest airmen in the world.
The Great War Display Team was founded in 1988 and has since gone on to become one of Britain's premier display teams, with a wealth of talented pilots passing through its ranks and amazing crowds with a variety of recreated aircraft including Fokker Dr1s, Royal Aircraft Factory S.
Alarmstart (scramble) charts the experiences of the German fighter pilots in the Second World War, based on extensive recollections of veterans as well as primary documents, diaries and flying log books, with photographs from the veterans themselves, many never previously published.
Duncan Menzies flew with the RAF, the Aeroplane and Armament Evaluation Establishment, and Fairey Aviation in a twenty-five-year flying career, seeing the world of flying change from open cockpits and few rules to the jet age, with its complexities and crowded skies.
Summer 1940, Britain is on the brink, fewer than 3,000 RAF fighter pilots stand between Hitler's Luftwaffe and air supremacy over the skies of southern England - the prerequisite for a German invasion.
Pitched into the maelstrom of air fighting in the summer of 1940, twenty-four-year-old Gordon Olive barely lived to tell this extraordinary tale of courage and endurance.
This is a fighter pilot's memoir of four tumultuous years, 1938-1942, when he was first trained, then fought and survived in not one but two of the biggest aerial campaigns of the war, the Battle of Britain and the equally epic, but lesser known, Siege of Malta.
The Avro Lancaster took the RAF's bombing campaign right to the heart of Nazi Germany, night after night, despite sometimes suffering appalling losses.
Volume 4 of We Were Eagles reaches the climax of the daylight bomber war which saw the Eighth Air Force B-17s and B-24s push back the boundaries and huge fleets of bombers penetrate further into the diminishing Reich.
Volume 3 of We Were Eagles covers the turning of the tide, when the air war was redirected to bombing communications targets in northern France in support of the 6 June D-Day invasion and the eventual breakout by Allied forces from the beachheads.
Wessex - for our purposes Dorset and Wiltshire, along with the western parts of Hampshire and Berkshire - has been part of Britain's aviation industry for over a hundred years.
What Manfred von Richthofen was to Germany, Albert Ball was to Great Britain: each, at the time, was the star turn of his country and Richthofen would describe Ball as 'by far the best English flying man'.
During the 1930s the need for a municipal aerodrome near Watford was debated at length, but it took almost a decade before the Air Ministry ultimately requisitioned the land at Leavesden for an aircraft factory.
This is the Battle of Britain memoir of Roger Hall, a 152 Squadron Spitfire pilot based in southern England, the heart of the fighting during the epic battle.
Written by 43 Squadron's intelligence officer, Hector Bolitho, Finest of the Few is full of John's first-hand accounts of his combat missions against German Me 109s, Heinkel 111s and Dorniers.
