Ready For Takeoff - Turn Your Aviation Passion Into A Career

Neil Hansen began his aviation career as a pilot for Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. He spent more than a decade in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War era as a captain for Air America, the CIA's airline that operated there during the Vietnam era and the 'Secret War' in Laos. Neil reveled in the risky flying that fed his adrenaline addiction.  Upon returning to the States, ultimately unable to find work and unable to let go of the Air America exhilaration rush, he saw the profession he loved come to an end when his trajectory veered off course.   Neil Hansen's engrossing memoir FLIGHT avoids the standard pilot cliches -- there is nothing stereotypical about the exciting "war stories" deftly recounted in this book.  Hansen's riveting prose describes his adventures as an Air America civilian pilot for the CIA's clandestine Southeast Asia airline during the 1950--76 "secret air war" in Laos and Cambodia -- officially neutral countries, but the scene of countless U.S. covert operations. There is "an allure so mystic