Eighty Flights of a Not-So-Much-Of-A-Fighter-Pilot

The first time I heard of the IAR-80 was at the start of the 90s, when, as a child, I stumbled upon a magazine which had a cardboard model of the plane inside of it. It wasn't expensive. I bought ten of them. None of my magazines survived. However, the mischief was accomplished. I had fallen in love with the plane.
Later, a full-scale model was exhibited in the Romanian Aviation Museum. Plastic models showed up, and later on, the model was even introduced into flight simulators. Inch by inch, this plane came back from the dead. An entire encyclopedia is available online today. But something was missing.
I wanted badly to read a book with the IAR-80. A book which was not about the machine. Not a technical description of it. I wanted a book, fiction or not, where the 80 to be at home as a character.
Pierre Closterman wrote a book. Adolf Galland wrote one, too. It was never translated into English, but Ion Dobran also published his war diary. However, people have yet to write anything similar about the 80. Many short stories were published, some containing only a few lines extracted from a mission report, but I never found a real book. I decided to write one myself.
It is not a book about the war. It does not contain the typical there I was, at ten thousand feet, when I got jumped by enemy fighters, and I shot them all down kind of a book. This is a peace story weaved around a war machine. It is not a historical book. Don't look for facts and numbers in it.
Like Patrick O'Brian, I mended historical elements with fiction. Some of the characters in the book existed for real. The context of the book is historical, too, and follows a historical timeline. Other characters are fictitious. It is a pure coincidence if their names match some from real life.
It is also a philosophical book. I did my best to mix the philosophy of peace with the excitement of flying and some historical facts. I hope it all came out nicely.

Dettagli