and assemble the engine again.

1914 and the start of WW1, the Royal Navy has a tiny, fledgling air service with a small number of unreliable and underperforming aircraft, with no real clue about how to use them. Four years later, they had thousands of fighters including the best of the war, hundreds of seaplanes and the ships to carry them and hundreds of airships patrolling for submarines. They had been used at sea and overland from the Dardanelles to the Western Front and the Mediterranean.

Bob Hunt was one of those early aviators. His story and that of his friend Arnold St John-Stevens form the narrative of how the Royal Naval Air Service developed so rapidly and effectively and eventually became part of the Royal Air Force only four years after the war started. The two men are in the thick of it from the first deployment of British aircraft to France in 1914, the first flights of powered airships and the development and deployment of the best fighter of WW1, the Sopwith Camel. The story ends during the air campaign in the Adriatic, which is little known about but gave birth to the tactics of projecting air power that are still in use today.

Based on extensive research the novel tells many little-known true stories of what it was really like to fly and fight in the air in those early days. It even explains how it was the Royal Naval Air Service, not the army that was responsible for the development of the armoured car and the tank.

This is the first novel about the ‘Hunt’ family of naval pilots and tells the story of Bob Hunt one of the early naval aviation pioneers in WW1. The next three are the ‘John Hunt’ trilogy based on the author's father’s combat career in WW2. The final ten are the ‘Johnathon Hunt’ series starting with the Falklands War and ending at the turn of the century and are based on the author’s own experience as a naval aviator. He apologises for writing a dynastic series backwards, it just turned out that way.