Throughout its life, now 75 years and counting, millions of words have been written about the iconic DC-3/C-47/R4D/Dakota. I’ve written some of them, and read most of them. So I cracked the cover on Together We Fly: Voices from the DC-3 with some trepidation. At best I expected to read stories I already knew told with new words, but the author, Julie Boatman Filucci, served up a delightful surprise: intriguing new stories about the people who designed, built, flew, maintained, and lived a better life—or just lived—because this airplane existed.
Voices subdivides more than 75 years of DC-3 history into 30 clear, concise, and evocative chapters that fill all but a handful of its 192 well illustrated pages. In the preface, which follows the forward by Jack Pelton, the retired Cessna CEO who started his career as a Douglas Aircraft engineer, Filucci explains that the book grew out of the December 2005 story she did for AOPA Pilot about the airplane’s 70th birthday. In response to it, “pilots, mechanics, flight attendants, engineers, soldiers, passengers, and spectators wanted to share their relationship with the airplane.” Do yourself a favor, don’t start reading until you take care of all your immediate responsibilities—work, making dinner, sleep, whatever.
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