Flying Conquistadors! …The adventures of Oliver Wheelock in this reading work of fiction are situated in the beginning of the 1930’s, the years in which aviation started to become professional. Oliver starts his working career as a youngster with Pan American working from an airport in the south of Florida in the first year of its existence. He is hired as a hangar cleaner but soon he gets involved in all kind of jobs on board the twin engine flying boats that were the working horses of the young Pan Am company. Loading mailbags, on board passenger assistance, radio operator and selling round trip tickets to and from Cuba, he experiences it all.
The real adventures are starting when he attends a promotional Pan Am flight visiting the ancient ruins of the Maya age in the north of Mexico. The characters involving this flight have well known names like author Ernest Hemmingway, the famous pilot Charles Lindbergh and the founder of Pan American World Airways mister Juan Trippe.
The pilot on this trip is Lindbergh playing a very dramatic role that is not what you may expect from such a famous and cool figure. The descriptions of the desolate areas they are visiting, the adventures in the air even involving a deadly ditch in a river, encounters with the local people of Mexico and of course a romantic confrontation with a female artist who works as a volunteer with the archaeologists. It’s all written down in this book.
Reading this book you will get mixed feelings. Did it work that way in those years? Were Hemmingway and Lindbergh such strange short tempered characters? You are strangely pushed around between reality and fiction and the autobiographical character of the book suggests that it all happened in real. This book is a mixture of flying stories and cultural ancient discoveries of ruins from the Mayan history combined with dramatic events in which Lindbergh and Hemmingway are playing the main role.
The book contains 454 pages and is executed with a soft laminated cover with a colored illustration. It is nice reading material for the aviation enthusiasts but more for readers that can dream away in travels into new undiscovered areas in the early thirties with an old and ancient flying boat piloted by Charles Lindbergh himself and accompanied by the famous Ernest Hemmingway while sipping a glass of whiskey with him
What more can you wish for?
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