• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1 - First Flight
• Profile: Charles J. (Charlie) Boyd
• Chapter 2 - Becoming a Pilot
• Profile: John Myers
• Chapter 3 - Soaring
• Profile: Alcide (Al) Santilli
• Chapter 4 - The Landing
• Profile: Antonio (Tony) Sabino
• Chapter 5 - From A to B
• Profile: Laszlo (Les) Horvath
• Chapter 6 - All of a Piece
• Profile: Christine (Chris) Doig
• Chapter 7 - All Kinds of Air, All Kinds of Flying
• Profile: Carl Ray Smith
• Chapter 8 - Buttoning Up and Getting Going
• Profile: J. William (Bill) Bullock
• Chapter 9 - Helping Out
• Profile: Gerald (Jerry) Hoogerwerf
• Chapter 10 - Making It
• Afterword
• Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 - First Flight

here is something about New Mexico that beckons one aloft—endless skies, gorgeous mountains, mesas rising nearly vertically from the desert floor, cumulus clouds piled up like gobs of whipped cream (sometimes, when you fly through them, they feel more like potatoes not fully mashed).

That's where I got hooked on flying. It was 1953. I was 27. I had had only one previous flight in a small plane. A year earlier, a sixteen-year old boy with a pilot's license, the son of a security guard at the Princeton lab where I was working, invited me for a flight in a Piper Cub (Piper J-3, as it was officially called). I was entranced as he did spins (illegal with me aboard) and buzzed his girlfriend's house (also illegal). The seed was planted.

I had just earned a Ph.D. in physics at Princeton and was spending the summer at the atomic laboratory in Los Alamos. A couple of years earlier, I had been a junior member of the H-bomb design team there, and had then worked at a satellite lab of Los Alamos in Princeton. So I had saved a bit of money. For $1,700—most of my savings—I bought a new Plymouth in Trenton, New Jersey, and drove west in it. But once I got settled again in New Mexico, something clicked in my brain. I needed to fly.