The Flying Business

The flying business seizes Patrick Montalto at an early age. A young, Italian-American from New York, his earliest memories of a fragile biplane avoiding a disastrous end on a summer's day in the country provide the single-minded impetus to an improbable journey.

It starts when his father and a friend chip in for a harmless airplane ride from a small grass airstrip in the Westchester hills. It is a coming of age journey as Patrick learns to fly on that field during a Depression that doesn't allow for many dreams. As the Second World War engulfs Europe, it takes Patrick to a barely clandestine British operation to recruit American flyers, where he has to choose between one dream of the sky and another of a college education.

His choice finds him first in the cold skies of Canada and then the gray, damp and simmering strife of Northern Ireland, where he makes lifelong friends and learns the basics of being a fighter pilot. Expecting to join fellow Americans flying Spitfires in the RAF Eagle Squadrons, his mission is instead flying American P-40s in the bloody skies over Egypt's Western Desert trying to stop Rommel's Afrika Korps from rampaging to Suez.