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Duster Pilot

by Ray Bernard

172 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #06-1147; ISBN 1-4120-9393-7; US$19.95, C$22.94, EUR16.39, £11.47

The life story of a hired killer... In Central America, the United States, New England and Eastern Canada.

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About the Book

About the Author

Excerpts

Catalogue Information

About the Book

This novel covers the adult life of one professional aviator who searched for his fortune with agriculturally equipped airplanes. He applied his aeronautical expertise in agricultural aviation killing insects from Newfoundland to Central America. Flying everything fro Piper Aircraft Super Cubs to the famous WW II Stearman, the author made his mark.

His aeronautical exploits and romantic adventures will keep you on the edge of your seat for the duration of this book.

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About the Author

For crop duster Raymond Bernard, heaven was only a few feet off the ground and only a split second away from hell. Freedom came in short, solitary journeys, in pint-sized aircraft dropping chemicals from hoppers over open fields. It came in nomadic migrations, following the seasons from Texas to Peru, to Nicaragua to Canada and back again. It came in late night fiestas and dawn passes over fog-shrouded crops, where death could come at any time from an unseen power line or a sudden , midair stall. Ray Bernard chronicles a lifestyle as harrowing and sorrowful as it is exhilarating. He first discovers his destiny as a seven-year-old boy touching the skeleton of an airplane wing under repair. Unfulfilled by model airplanes, he teams with his brother Lynn to build a full-sized flyer that briefly gets off the ground before it self-destructs. But that is all it takes. Years later, Lynn brings Ray to Texas and introduces him to his first crop-duster. Giving rides to passengers, including pregnant women, sitting in an empty hopper, Ray learns to fly.

Learning by doing becomes his modus operandi. He survives his first ill-fated job, but comes away from it with a black eye and experience. After Texas, Ray enrolls in flight school to get his flying license before proceeding to the rice paddies in California, and to the purchase of his first plane: a fixer-upper, towed off the back of a Pontiac, that he rebuilds in his back yard. That Stearman is the first of many planes of his acquaintance. Soon Ray is at the controls of Champions, Cubs, and Fairchilds, as varied in condition as they are in chassis. Some take him off-course; others plummet to the ground. Ray survives, but soon understands crop-dusting's toll on men's lives, their families, and their sanity.

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Excerpts

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Catalogue Information

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