One Zero Charlie: Adventures in Grass Roots Aviation

by Laurence Gonzales

A look at private aviation focuses on Galt Airport in northern Illinois, describing the flying men and women who have made it special. 15,000 first printing.

Genres: Aviation

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 22, 1992

About the author

Laurence Gonzales is the author of Surviving Survival and the bestseller Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why. He has won two National Magazine Awards. His essays are collected in the book House of Pain.

Reviews

[Beedo180 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Americana captured as a small airport well NW of Chicago. Great characters. It tells the human story of aviation. If you love flying, read this.

[Majel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. I have tags and post-it notes so many places so that I can re-read how he described things just so. I had already read Flight 232, so I was familiar with Gonzales' work, but in this book, I discovered how much of a pilot he really is. He is an instrument rated commercial pilot and aerobatics pilot. This book reads as a love letter to aviation, filled with poetic writing, reminiscing, acute observations, and his attempt at dissecting just what craziness makes us trust that hunk of bolts and spark and bang to defy gravity and bring us back down alive. He gives life to aviation culture and customs in a way that I hadn't realized was happening, like the tadpole who doesn't know how to describe water because they've been swimming in it. I would read passages and fall in love with the sky, my airport, and my airplane all over again. And I'd want to take myself back up into that craziness that is flight. He wrote:
"Through the process of assimilation, the real world of aviation in which I live my daily life and fly my little airplane became obscured. Even people who are interested in airplanes now have little notion of what the life of the common American aviator is like, who is neither a fight pilot nor an astronaut...American aviation is made up of little airports out in the farm fields where regular people are flying and dying in ordinary airplanes on the ordinary days of their lives...This book is my attempt to leave an honest record of the sounds and smells and the feel of events in the waning days of the last of America's grass roots aviators." pg. 14
And I think he did just that.

[Sebastian Lombardi · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading Flight 232, I was curious to try another of Laurence’s books. This one did not disappoint and I would recommend it to anyone who flies and/or with an interest in aviation.

[John Sperling · Rating 5 out of 5]

With his dexterous use of words, Gonzales reveals the magic of flight.