To Fly!

by Brian Igoe

"To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. But to fly is everything." So wrote Otto Lilienthal, the man who inspired the Wright brothers. "To Fly is Everything" is a compendium of stories about flying adventures of a father and son, the father in the RAF and the son in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Bill Igoe learned to fly an aeroplane in 1934, forty years after the death of the Wright Brothers' inspiration Otto Lilienthal. In the RAF, after a spectacular crash in 1938 which left him badly burned and ended his flying days, he was, as Senior Controller at Biggin Hill, closely involved in many WW2 dramas, such as the saga of the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. And Bill’s son Brian learned to fly forty years after that, when the Concorde was around. Both shared Lilienthal’s sentiments and had a lot of fun and some stories to tell about their common addiction. These are some of the stories.

68 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 21, 2012

About the author

Brian Igoe holds an MA in law from Cambridge University in the UK, so he thinks he can write intelligibly. He is very much a family man who has four sons and three granddaughters. Last year he celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary. He never even thought about writing anything more than a diary or a business document until he retired. That momentous event left him with time to write for fun, almost exclusively history, sometimes presented in novel form. He now writes Ancient Roman history covering the late Republic to the early Empire, and has in the past written Irish history (he is Irish) and Southern African, since he lived in Zimbabwe for thirty years - he still thinks of that beautiful country as home even though he now lives in the UK. Apart from history, a passion since his schooldays, his other great passion has been flying light aircraft, which is how he survived the years of the Liberation Struggle, or so he says. That, and computers. He was running an automated dairy herd on a Kaypro “portable” computer in 1983 and has never looked back. That was why he took to eBooks as soon as he came across them, and now everything he writes is written chiefly for eBook publication, although there appears to be a shift in reader emphasis back to printed books, so he also offers Print On Demand versions (more expensive!).

Reviews

[Bev Oscroft · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book and so well written. I especially enjoyed the second half having lived on the tea estate Brian owned during the time of which he writes.