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Baling Out: Amazing Dramas of Military Flying
Author(s): Robert Jackson (Author)
- Publisher: Pen & Sword Books Ltd
- Publication Date: 20 April 2006
- Edition: Illustrated
- Language: English
- Print length: 224 pages
- ISBN-10: 1844153479
- ISBN-13: 9781844153473
Book Description
To bale out of a stricken aeroplane is a pilot’s or aircrew’s final chance to escape death. It is a traumatic and hazardous exercise that is only practiced in extremis and is in itself full of danger with no guarantee of survival. Many struggled free of a flaming and spinning aircraft only to see their parachute alight above them, some were machine gunned to death by their opponents as they drifted to earth, some landed in mine-fields and were blown apart and many landed in forests and died suspended from the treetops. And yet many survived, some to fight again and some to become prisoners of war. This book relates the experiences of many airmen who survived to tell the tale, some quite remarkable because of pure good luck, some because of ingenuity and some through pure determination to survive at all costs. This book includes escapes from crippled German, British and US aircraft; stories of the first pilots to use parachutes in WW1; amazing escapes from aircraft in the inter-war years.
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
ROBERT JACKSON is the author of over eighty books on military, aviation, naval and scientific subjects. He was defense and science correspondent for a major British newspaper publishing group. Among the other books he has compiled for Pen & Sword are Bf-109 in the FlightCraft series and for TankCraft he has written extensively on the T-34, the Panzer I and II, the Centurion and Chieftain Main Battle Tanks as well as the Russian T54/55.
