Red Eagles Americas Secret Migs 1st Edition Steve Davies Author General J Jumper Forward by Steve Davies (author) & General J. Jumper (forward) 9781849088398, 184908839X instant download after payment.

This story is not grounded in absolute historical certainties, but rather is an amalgamation of the memories of 31 of a total of 69 Red Eagle pilots whose names appear on the official pilot roster of the 4477th Test & Evaluation Squadron (TES), United States Air Force (USAF), between April 1977 and March 1988. In addition, I interviewed six maintainers and several other non-flying Red Eagles.

I would love to have had a range of contemporary documents for reference, but sadly many have been lost, others were deliberately shredded in 1988, and those few that were preserved for declassification were burned in a safe when a hijacked airliner hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Simple arithmetic dictates that even the freshest memories were 20 years old when this book was written, and that the oldest have had more than 30 years to dim. This fact is important, because in the course of the 65 hours of taped interviews I conducted and transcribed, there were many contradictions and disagreements about what happened and when, at the hands of whom, and why. Throughout the text I have relied extensively on quotations taken from these interviews, which were conducted in person or over the telephone between January and September 2007. 

(From Acknowledgments)

About the Author

Steve Davies is a military aviation photojournalist based in Cambridge, England. He has authored eleven critically acclaimed books and co-authored five more, and he’s written for the world's leading monthly, quarterly and partwork aviation publications. He has worked both in front of and behind the camera as a subject matter expert on multiple military aviation television documentaries. Finally, his photography has been used not only by the aviation press, but also by leading defence contractors and