Booklist Review
Seasoned pilot and aviation writer Olsen offers portraits of four kinds of peacetime flying that aren't too well known to the public but put aircraft and pilots at the kind of risk commonly associated with combat. One kind involves flying dog teams into remote portions of the Arctic, landing on icecaps for exploration and rescue. Then there is helicopter air-ambulance work, moving critical-condition patients across the upper Great Plains. There is hurricane hunting, whose practitioners flew C-130s to get close looks at Katrina and Rita, among others. Finally, aerial firefighting drops borate solutions and water from frequently aging aircraft, flying low and slow and fighting updrafts and rugged terrain as the planes' centers of gravity rapidly change. It's hard to imagine a more gripping book for aviation buffs than Olsen's depiction of some of the hairier aspects of service networks usually taken for granted and seldom properly noticed by the media.--Green, Roland Copyright 2008 Booklist
Library Journal Review
With Gravity: The Allure of Distance and At Speed already to his credit, Olsen (English, Concordia Coll.) focuses his latest book on pilots flying on the edge of civilization and on the edge, and sometimes in the midst, of danger. The first-person account begins and ends with the author's own adventures in learning to fly, and in between he discusses his involved coverage of dangerous flights at the North Pole, hunting hurricanes, providing airborne ambulance service, and fighting fires. Though Olsen is not doing the flying himself, his narrative is reminiscent in tone of Beryl Markham's early African aviation adventures chronicled in West with the Night. The book might have been even more engaging if Olsen himself was the pilot, but he does a good job of capturing, in a journalistic interview style, the experiences of the men and women who routinely fly these adventurous missions. The stories are good enough to inspire future pilots. Recommended for public and academic libraries with travel and/or aviation collections.-Sara Tompson, Univ. of Southern California Lib., Los Angeles (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
![Cover image for Hard air [electronic resource] : adventures from the edge of flying / W. Scott Olsen.](/client/assets/5.1326/ctx//client/images/no_image.png "Cover image for Hard air [electronic resource] : adventures from the edge of flying / W. Scott Olsen.")