Never ask a build like this when the first flight is…

When I was building my Falco and people asked me that, as they inevitably would, I would say, “That’s like asking me when I’ll f**k Julia Roberts. It could be tomorrow, could be next week, could be never…”

It’s not an autobiography but a collection of autobiographical accounts: “Test Pilot,” by Jimmy Collins. It was originally published in the late 1930s and reissued in 2008.

Collins was a test, Army pursuit, airline and corporate pilot, though the lattermost was a job at the time called “private pilot.” He was also a sometime magazine writer. In fact he had decided to quit test-flying and try writing full-time, but he had one last job to do: dive-testing the Grumman XF3F biplane. On his last dive, last day of work, he pulled the wings off and died. Incredibly, he had written his own obituary (which is in this book) titled, as I remember, “I Am Dead,” about what he imagined it would be like to die in an airplane that came apart in the air.

Collins might have become (almost) another Ernie Gann, had he continued to write.

If you have a Kindle (or maybe any e-book reader), “Test Pilot” can be downloaded free as part of the Gutenberg Project.

Sadly, a great deal of “Reach For The Sky” is little more than fiction and I’m afraid that many books of the genre and period are even more so.

In the U.S. during that era of Postwar aviation-“history” writing, one of the biggest names was Martin Caidin, a colorful writer with little repute as an actual historian.