A test pilot for Howard Hughes separates fact from fiction to tell the inside story of the aviation genius who set speed records in the 1930s and went on to develop some of America’s most famous aircraft and weapons. George Marrett draws on his wealth of experiences and those of other Hughes confidants to take readers inside Hughes’s complex world—a world that has kept its secrets for nearly six decades. Both a gifted storyteller and a top-notch aviator himself,...
In Contrails over the Mojave George Marrett takes off where Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff ended in 1963. Marrett started the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB only two weeks after the school’s commander, Col. Chuck Yeager, ejected from a Lockheed NF-104 trying to set a world altitude record. He describes life as a space cadet experiencing 15 Gs in a human centrifuge, zero-G maneuvers in a KC-135 “Vomit Comet,” and a flight to 80,000 feet in the...
