One Zero Charlie: Adventures in Grass Roots Aviation

by Laurence Gonzales

Overview

Galt Airport in northern Illinois is known to the people who fly out of it as “One-Zero-Charlie” (for its FAA designation as Airport 10C). This evocative excursion into a little-known part of the heart of America takes us to a place where a love of flying draws people together, and a fascination with its sheer exhilaration keeps them that way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781416576419
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	09/10/2007
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Laurence Gonzales is the author of the best-selling title Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. He has won numerous awards for his books and essays, including two National Magazine Awards, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Editorial Reviews

Gonzales ( The Still Point ) conveys the mystique of piloting an aircraft; when he writes of the freedom and joys the skies afford he approaches the lyricism of Saint-Exupery. But in his portraits of others similarly obsessed with flying and with speed, and with his emphasis on aerobatics, he loses his primary focus, which is the disappearance of ``grass roots airports'' like Galt, near Chicago, Gonzales's headquarters. Although his lament for the vanishing small airfields is heartfelt, few readers are likely to share Gonzales's passionate regret that small private planes are also becoming extinct. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This is an arresting book on private aviation, wherein the author describes, in storytelling fashion, how what appears to most of us as a hobby is actually a way of life bordering on obsession to the many who are intimately involved. The importance of ``general'' as opposed to ``commercial'' aviation is never quite spelled out, but readers will be both entertained and moved by this compelling portrait. Gonzales, author of The Still Point (Univ. of Arkansas Pr., 1990), successfully tells of the men and women who pursue this lifestyle and the needs and desires that drive them. Packed with a variety of tales from snowblind takeoff and landings to the horrors of plane crashes, the book is full of action. Recommended for popular aviation collections.-- Eric C. Shoaf, Duke Univ. Lib., Durham, N.C.

Library Journal