First-of-her-kind President Libby Paulsen is in a world of trouble. Her controversial agenda has made her the target of a right wing military cabal led by an enigmatic Air Force general. The conspirators will stop at nothing--including assassination--to remove Libby Paulsen from office. When the cabal targets Air Force One, Libby's Presidency--and her life--rest in the hands of a maverick pilot named Pete Brand, a man with whom the President shares a long-smoldering secret.
In Skygods, Robert Gandt, a Pan Am pilot for twenty-six years, gives the first inside account of Pan Am's unprecedented demise. To tell the complete story, Gandt interviewed hundreds of former Pan Am airmen and executives. Gandt reveals what really happened in the cockpits, where Pan Am's captains, dressed in Navy-style uniforms, once ruled their ships like petty tyrants. Though Pan Am captains were considered the best and the brightest in the industry, Skygods tells disturbing stories of captains who let stewardesses land their planes, who flew at the wrong altitude and in the wrong direction, and who tragically disappeared along with their planes into the night. Gandt takes readers behind the scenes at Pan Am's executive offices in the landmark Pan Am building - a massive edifice to the founder's personal vision. He shows how a series of impulsive and short-sighted CEOs succeeded in destroying one of America's greatest companies. Pan Am employees were rocked by the company's decision to purchase a domestic carrier - at an eventual cost of nearly a billion dollars. Strapped with debt and flying half-empty planes to places like Monrovia, Rabat, and Lagos, Pan Am then stunned its employees by selling its profitable Pacific routes. The airline that could bend the wills of American presidents was reduced to relying on the Shah of Iran for the financial salvation it would never receive. read more on amazon >
The Twilight Warriors, winner of the 2011 Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature, is the engrossing, page-turning saga of a tightly knit band of naval aviators who are thrust into the final—and most brutal—battle of the Pacific war: Okinawa.April 1945. The end of World War II finally appears to be nearing. The Third Reich is collapsing in Europe, and the Americans are overpowering the once-mighty Japanese Empire in the Pacific. For a group of young pilots trained in the twilight of the war, the greatest worry is that it will end before they have a chance to face the enemy. They call themselves Tail End Charlies. They fly at the tail end of formations, stand at the tail end of chow lines, and now they are catching the tail end of the war. What they don’t know is that they will be key players in the bloodiest and most difficult of naval battles—not only of World War II but in all of American history.
The Twilight Warriors relives the drama of the world’s last great naval campaign. From the cockpit of a Corsair fighter we gaze down at the Japanese task force racing to destroy the American amphibious force at Okinawa. Through the eyes of the men on the destroyers assigned to picket ship duty, we experience the terror as wave after wave of kamikazes crash into their ships. Standing on the deck of the legendary superbattleship Yamato,we watch Japan’s last hope for victory die in a tableau of gunfire and explosions. read full description on amazon.com >
When the China Clipper shattered aviation records on its maiden six-day flight from California to the Orient in 1935, the flying boat became an instant celebrity. This lively history by Robert Gandt traces the development of the great flying boats as both a triumph of technology and a stirring human drama. He examines the political, military, and economic forces that drove its development and explains the aeronautical advances that made the aircraft possible. To fully document the story he includes interviews with flying boat pioneers and a dynamic collection of photographs, charts, and cutaway illustrations.
The USS Intrepid is a warship unlike any other. Since her launching in 1943, the 27,000-ton, Essex-class aircraft carrier has sailed into harm’s way around the globe. During World War II, she fought her way across the Pacific—Kwajalein, Truk, Peleliu, Formosa, the Philippines, Okinawa—surviving kamikaze and torpedo attacks and covering herself with glory. The famous ship endured to become a Cold War attack carrier, recovery ship for America’s first astronauts, and a three-tour combatant in Vietnam.
In a riveting narrative based on archival research and interviews with surviving crewmen, authors Bill White and Robert Gandt take us inside the war in the Pacific. We join Intrepid’s airmen at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, in October 1944, as they gaze in awe at the apparitions beneath them: five Japanese battleships, including the dreadnoughtsYamato and Musashi, plus a fleet of heavily armored cruisers and destroyers. The sky fills with multihued bursts of anti-aircraft fire. The flak, a Helldiver pilot would write in his action report, “was so thick you could get out and walk on it.” Half a dozen Intrepid aircraft are blown from the sky, but they sink the Musashi. A few months later, off Okinawa, they again meet her sister ship, the mighty Yamato. In a two-hour tableau of hellfire and towering explosions, Intrepid’s warplanes help send the super-battleship and 3,000 Japanese crewmen to the bottom of the sea. read full description on amazon.com >
Americans are fascinated by the undeniable mystique of the elite world of Navy fighter pilots. In Bogeys and Bandits, Robert Gandt takes readers on a thrilling ride in the FA-18 Hornet, one of the fastest, sleekest, and deadliest aircraft in the world. Gandt lived and worked with several pilots learning to fly the Hornet: the identical twins from Middle America; the computer nerd with a penchant for speed; the grandson of a Tuskegee Airman, trying to live up to a proud legacy; and two women dealing with the post-Tailhook world of the Navy. Gandt weaves superb technological details of the Hornet and an insider's look at the highly demanding training program with portraits of the day-to-day lives of these very real people aspiring to fulfill a dream. Bogeys and Bandits will hold readers breathless as they soar through the skies in the cockpit of the fastest and deadliest fighter plane in the world.
A motor launch carrying the USS Ronald Reagan's top brass is attacked. Everyone on board is killed, including two admirals and a U.S. ambassador. The U.S. vows a swift reprisal.
Enter squadron skipper Brick Maxwell and his Roadrunners--the F/A-18 Hornet strike fighter pilots aboard the Reagan. Their mission: strike deep in northern Yemen's highlands. The target: Colonel Jamal Al-Fasr, the charismatic commander who has masterminded the plot to kill the Americans.
Al-Fasr is also a skilled fighter pilot who learned his craft in the U.S. He has laid a deadly trap for Maxwell and the warriors of the Reagan Strike Group. The danger lies not only in the hills of Yemen. Lurking beneath the surface of the Arabian Sea is an ex-Russian Kilo submarine, whose mission is to sink the Reagan...
"More thrilling than a back-to-back showing of Top Gun and Iron Eagle... some of the most suspenseful battle scenes in recent military fiction..." --Publishers Weekly.
In Fly Low, Fly Fast, Robert Gandt takes us into the high-risk world of airplane racing, chronicling the 1997 and 1998 championships at the Reno Air Races, attended every year by more than 100,000 spectators and featured on scores of web sites. Flying wingtip to wingtip around pylons at 500 mph, just feet above the sagebrush, Reno's killing machines are piloted by an adrenaline-addicted, type-A elite whose big talent and big egos spawn a hundred stories. With the same vivid reportage of his Bogeys and Bandits --"about as close as you can get (to the cockpit) without arming the ejection seat," said the San Diego Union-Tribune--Gandt traces the history of this exhilarating but often deadly sport. He follows the evolution of competition planes from the 1930s custom exotics to today's big, throaty warbirds like the Mustang and Bearcat, still the fastest piston-engine planes ever built. Gandt also looks at the evolution of the pilots from famous laconic old-time air cowboys to the younger, slicker hot shots, the jet-fighter-trained "top guns."
Fly Low, Fly Fast ignites with fierce rivalries, the struggles to keep the vintage warbirds flying, the heart-stopping drama of the races themselves...with winners, losers, close calls, spectacular crashes, and glorious victories. It's a book for aviation buffs, armchair adventurers and anyone fascinated by the passions that drive men and women to test their limits--and risk their lives--in the quest for speed.
Brick Maxwell lost a good friend and squadron mate when Raz Rasmussen was shot down on the opening night of the first Gulf War. Though Raz's body was never recovered, he was declared KIA and soon forgotten. Years later, when Raz's now-remarried wife receives a call claiming Raz is alive, she asks Maxwell for help. At first Maxwell is ignored by the CIA--until his old enemy, Jamal Al-Fasr, is captured on the Iraq-Iran border and offers to trade himself for an American POW. Maxwell attends the exchange, hoping the POW will turn out to be Raz. But the CIA has its own agenda--and a shocking betrayal places Maxwell in the kill zone...
The Gulf War has been over for ten years. It's up to Hornet pilots like Cmdr. Brick Maxwell and his glory-seeking commanding officer, Killer Delancey, to keep the peace by a narrow margin--a margin called the No-Fly Zone. The Iraqi MiG pilots buzz the borders--just close enough to shake up the U.S. Hornets' nest. And the rules of engagement require the Hornets to hold their fire unless the Iraqis show hostile intent.
When an Iraqi MiG penetrates the invisible wall of the No-Fly Zone, all hell breaks out--on both sides of the border. And for Brick Maxwell, it becomes impossible to tell WHO is the enemy...
When a routine American-Israeli military exercise goes wrong, Brick Maxwell's wingman is shot down and taken prisoner by a Palestinian splinter group. Negotiating the flier's release is the President's shadowy, power-hungry special envoy, Rick Solares. Though the pilot is set free, Brick suspects there is more to the arrangement than meets the eye. And when the woman he loves falls victim to the terrorists, his devotion to duty turns into a desire for vengeance. With the help of his Roadrunner squadron, Maxwell will risk everything to make the enemy pay...
Cmdr. Brick Maxwell and his F/A-18 squadron are flying cover for the president of Taiwan's jetliner when it is blown out of the sky. Other than a slight shimmer of light preceding the catastrophe, there's no visible cause for the explosion. But Maxwell suspects that China has stolen the plans for the Black Star -- a virtually invisible superstealth fighter. Now a full-scale war is inevitable -- unless Maxwell and a team of commandos can hijack the state-of-the-art killing machine. But with a beautiful defector of dubious loyalties guiding them, the mission can take a wrong turn at any moment...
As China expands its industrial might, it becomes one of the biggest oil-consuming countries in the world. And the only thing blocking China's access to an unlimited fuel supply is the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. When a Vietnamese oil rig is destroyed, China is obviously the culprit. The U.S.--recently joined in a defense pact with Vietnam--calls upon Commander Brick Maxwell to fly the hyperadvanced Black Star stealth jet against the Chinese. But the Chinese have on their side technology to match America's--and one of Maxwell's old enemies, who is hunting him with a vengeance...