No Visible Horizon: Surviving the World's Most Dangerous Sport

Aerobatic pilots pull through impossibly elegant figures, twisting their planes at hundreds of miles per hour. In a bad year no sport kills more of its participants. To fly well you must depart the land of the possible and enter the place of pure faith. In this book, the author places the seductive art of aerobatic flying within a larger context of the buzz of extreme sports. It is partly an autobigraphical journey through his own ambition to transform himself from an everyday flyer into a serious competitive pilot capable of winning the US national championships, and partly the unforgettable life stories of the greatest aerobatic geniuses who redefined what it is possible to do in the air with a plane. People like Leo Loundenslager, a mild mannered American Airlines pilot who flew figures so hard they made his eyes bleed as he whimpered with pain in the cockpit. This book is an exploration, not simply of a pilot's physical battle against gravity, but of his dream of perfection and his quest for faith.