Last year, I went through a phase of reading early aviation memoirs. The book that started me on this kick was Beryl Markham’s West with the Night, in which the British-Kenyan aviatrix writes about flying over the Sahara in the early 1900s, delivering supplies between remote desert outposts. What interested me about Markham’s adventures wasn’t the records she set (she completed the first successful solo and nonstop flight from Britain to North America), but how little I could relate to her perspective. Night flights, before the invention of radar, often took place in complete darkness…

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