In company with some of his fellow flying boat captains, Captain Marius Lodeesen was a good writer as well as being a good pilot. He was perhaps the best writer of them all, because his subject material was invariably more than simply autobiographical�although there is much of that�and fascinating it is too.

Unlike his colleagues on the flight deck, who usually awaited their retirement before writing their books, Lodi (as he was known by one and all) found time to write extensively during his flying career. He contributed steadily to several aviation magazines, notably, in the United States, to Flying and Airline Pilot, and in Germany to Flg-Revue, Der Flieger, and Flugwelt. He even wrote for literary magazines such as The Writer and The Rotarian; and in his later years was featured in The Stars and Stripes, the magazine of the United States armed forces.

During his Pan American career, from the diminutive Sikorsky S-38 flying boat of the early 1930s to the Boeing 707 jet airliners of the 1960s, he often grieved for the death of his colleagues, as well as for thwir personal tragedies; and as the first chapter of this book relates, he came close to oblivion himself on at least on occasion. His post-war years ranged from the glamorous Constellations of Panair do Brasil to the C-54 workhorses of the Berlin Air Lift. His ancedotes, which crop up on almost every page, range from a little romance with La Vierge in the Indian Ocean to the remarkable and original calligrapher, Tapper Dan, in Karachi. Marius Lodeesen was a superb raconteur, and in the pages of this book, the imaginative reader can almost hear Captain Lodi speaking.