Book description
A few years after his release from a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war
camp in 1973, Colonel Joseph Kittinger retired from the Air Force.
Restless and unchallenged, he turned to ballooning, a lifelong passion
as well as a constant diversion for his imagination during his
imprisonment. His primary goal was a solitary circumnavigation of the
globe, and in its pursuit he set several ballooning distance records,
including the first solo crossing of the Atlantic in 1984. But the
aeronautical feats that first made him an American hero had occurred a
quarter of a century earlier.
By the time Kittinger was shot down in Vietnam in 1972, his Air Force
career was already legendary. He had made a name for himself at
Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico, as a test pilot
who helped demonstrate that egress survival for pilots at high
altitudes was possible in emergency situations. Ironically, Kittinger
and his pre-astronaut colleagues would help propel Americans into
space using the world's oldest flying machine--the balloon.
Kittinger's work on Project Excelsior--which involved daring
high-altitude bailout tests--earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross
long before he earned a collection of medals in Vietnam. Despite the
many accolades, Kittinger's proudest moment remains his free fall from
102,800 feet during which he achieved a speed of 614 miles per hour.
In this long-awaited autobiography, Kittinger joins author Craig Ryan
to document an astonishing career.
Selected by Popular Mechanics as a Top Book of 2010
Craig Ryan is the author of
Magnificent Failure: Free Fall from
the Edge of Space and The Pre-Astronauts: Manned Ballooning on the
Threshold of Space
. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
