Years ago, when a third-grader asked retired pilot Charles Cone how long he would keep flying, Cone replied: “As long as I can get into the cockpit.”
-- He meant it. Decades later, as Cone neared his 99th birthday, his daughter Shyrl tracked down the girl’s father to let her know that Cone was still flying. That promise runs through Cone’s memoir, A Burning Desire to Fly.
The story begins far from any runway. Cone was born in 1926 in a farmhouse in Covington, New York, and lost his mother, Mae, just two weeks later. He grew up during the Great Depression, helping on his grandparents’ hardscrabble farm and watching them boil maple sap into syrup each spring. Somewhere in those years, the sky got hold of him and never let go.
In 1944, he joined the Navy and pursued his dream of becoming a naval aviator, training in Pensacola. Patrol planes took him across the Pacific, through a typhoon, to Saipan, and on trips to Japan and China. Later, in the Air Force, came night missions in Korea, years of Strategic Air Command alerts in B-47, and a Vietnam assignment he trained for before choosing retirement.
The heart of the book, though, is home. Cone dedicates it to his wife, Jo, his “supportive partner for nearly sixty-nine years,” and the final pages belong to his children, who remember a family shaped by service. Shyrl recalls the day the landing gear on the family’s little cherry-red Comanche refused to lock in Selma, Alabama, as fire trucks stood ready. Shyrl, then a girl, was puzzled by the fuss. “My dad was the pilot,” she writes.
Cone wrote the memoir for his heirs, hoping they would see that their great-grandfather “played a small part in American history,” from the Depression to Vietnam. For everyone else, it is a portrait of a man who found what he loved early and stayed close to it for a lifetime.
Charles Cone is a retired military pilot who served in the Navy during World War II and later in the U.S. Air Force.
A Burning Desire to Fly is available through Amazon and other major digital bookstores.
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