Flight to Anywhere: A Navigator's Life

A twenty-three-year-old successfully navigates a massive aircraft over open water for eighteen hours - and it's the first time he has been up in a plane. That’s what happened to Mark Farmer just after Pearl Harbor. The aircraft was Pan American's famed Clipper, flying from San Francisco to Hawaii. After the war, Farmer navigated for both commercial airlines and the new "non-skeds," having adventures in Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America. He was involved in a highjacking, met the pope, evacuated political refugees, was befriended by a revolutionary leader, and flew during the Korean Airlift and Viet Nam Airlift. For anyone who lived through these times Flight to Anywhere will bring a flood of memories. For those too young, to show more remember even the Viet Nam war, Farmer paints a lively picture of a small-town boy who suddenly finds himself in places like Funafuti and the Azores and dealing with middle-eastern millionaires and plane loads of monkeys. His biography explores his expeditions in a frontier not previously available to his ancestors. show less

A twenty-three-year-old successfully navigates a massive aircraft over open water for eighteen hours - and it's the first time he has been up in a plane! That's what happened to Mark Farmer just after Pearl Harbor. The aircraft was Pan American's famed Clipper, flying from San Francisco to Hawaii. When the U.S. entered World War II the Navy had no transport aircraft capable of flying to Hawaii. The solution was to take over Pan American Airways, and give them military seaplanes to extend their service on to Australia by "island hopping" on coral atolls. Farmer's book paints a vivid picture of these flights and the affect that "civilization" had on these people who found themselves in the middle of someone else's war.