The  original three year, (yes, long overdue) and now decade long, project to re-release the aviation textbook
You Can Learn to Fly
continues with the release of a Kindle Reader version of the book.

As I write this (June 17, 2004,) the CD's are being printed and are ready ship the CD-ROM....

...Skip forward to November of 2011 and the re-release of You Can Learn to Fly continues as it has now been reformatted and re-released as a Kindle EBook which can be downloaded and read on any Kindle Reader or on most current mobile devices by installing the Kindle Reader App for that device.

Click here to purchase and download the Kindle Version of "You Can Learn to Fly"

The above link will also allow you to view a comprehensive sample of the book as it will appear in the Kindle edition including the original illustrations and table of contents.

This excellent aviation textbook was co-written by Bevo and the well known aviation writer William Strohmeier and was born from their combined experience at the Army Air Corps primary flight training school at Hawthorne Field where they trained thousands of military pilots for the WWII effort in and around Orangeburg, South Carolina flying Stearmans.

As I went through the process of converting the book to it's new electronic format, I was stunned to find, over and over again, the fact that many of the hard won aviation skills that I learned over many years in the air, the hard way,  had been fully and effectively covered in this primary flight textbook.  Had I taken the time to read this book in my youth, it would have saved me many hours of trial and error in the air.

CD copies containing the PDF format copy of the book are still available by contacting me directly. 

For those who have already purchased the CD version of this textbook and have a Kindle reader or device that supports the Kindle reader app or software, email me and I will send you a copy of the Kindle version of the book at no additional cost.

The current price for the CDRom version is now $15 plus $2 (USA) and $5 (International) shipping and handling.

At this time, we do not have a distributor or web payment account for the CD-Rom version, so we are asking for payment by check or money order mailed to;

You may also contact me by phone at 512-329-9113 between 9am-8pm central time.

At the start of this project in 2002, a year of experimenting with this book underscored the need to provide it in a reader format that allowed fast loading and fast navigation, including searching for specific terms in addition to providing a hyperlinked table of contents and index that allows one click access to their referenced pages.

Other EBook formats that I had originally considered such as Microsoft's Reader, proved quickly to be unsuitable for any reference or text book because of the demands on the reader to install and download content as well as functional limits such as the ability to navigate quickly from one part of the book to another.

From the start, another primary goal was to provide a usable reference book that was installable on a PDA to give the readers the ability to take the information with them and access it anywhere, including the cockpit of a two seat training aircraft.

It is now 2011 and EBook technology has evolved significantly since the book was released in PDF format in 2004.  The next step in keeping this valuable textbook alive and accessible to anyone who is interested in learning and understanding the basics of flight is in the Kindle EBook format.  The Kindle and Kindle reader apps provide instant loading, remembering your last page, bookmarks, searching and hyperlinks to both locations within the book as well as those on the internet.  You can also make and keep notes attached to the page that raised the question.

In addition to the Kindle Reader providing a convenient way to carry and read the book, even in a cockpit in full sunlight, the Kindle format is currently supported on almost all mobile devices in use today by the use of the free Kindle Reader "App" which can be easily installed on most phones and devices such as the iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, and many others.

Please contact us for reprint rights for other uses of the book's content and we will be happy to work with you to meet your needs.

The CDRom version contains installable copies of Windows Acrobat Reader and the PocketPC Acrobat Reader.  These can be installed directly from the CD by simply clicking on the installation links in the CD's startup page.  It also contains additional WWW links to download the readers for other computing platforms.

I am open to discuss any input on releasing it in other electronic or paper formats.

Hawthorne also ran a Navy Primary Flight Training school in Columbia, SC as well that trained naval aviators using Piper Cubs rather then the Stearmans that were used in Orangeburg.

A Few Thoughts on Copyrights, Rights and Real Life 

Going through this legal process while the Sonny Bono copyright extension to 70 years and the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) were headline news was educational.

My personal conclusion from this process is that these dangerous extensions of the copyright laws are playing a major role in assuring that a high percentage of works written after 1930 will be lost forever as the diminishing number paper copies disappear and disintegrate but the legal copyright issues that remain in place will prevent all but the most dedicated from preserving earlier works in electronic format.

The final owner of this book's original publisher's rights (which, as far as I know, was never profitable) remained in total legal control of the future of the reprint of this one work even though they didn't feel there was any residual value in it and responded in lock step using such archaic terms as "offset fees" and policies that didn't even acknowledge that e-book technology exists.  From my perspective, the current laws relate more to speculation and power than they do about protecting the rights of the originators who are, in real life circumstances, frequently not beneficiaries of the protections provided by the law.

My father, Beverly Howard, was killed at the age of 57 while performing aerobatics at a charity air show in Greenville, NC in October of 1971.

William D. Strohmeier, the co-author of this book, died on September 24, 2009 at the age of 93.

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