The three year (yes,
long overdue)
project to re-release the aviation textbook
You Can Learn to Fly
is finally complete.
The three year (yes,
long overdue)
project to re-release the aviation textbook
You Can Learn to Fly
is finally complete.
As I write this (June 17, 2004,) the CD's are being printed and are ready ship the CD-ROM. The "download only" sales will initially handled via email until we establish a secure download site.
This excellent textbook was co-written by Bevo and the well known aviation writer William Strohmeier and came out of their combined experience at the Army Air Corps primary flight training school at Hawthorne Field that 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.
The price for the CDRom version is $25 plus $2 (USA) and $5 (International) shipping and handling.
To receive the E-Book via E-Mail (a 5 megabyte file) the cost is $20
At this time, we do not have a distributor or web payment account, so we are asking for payment by check or money order mailed to;
YCLTF Re-Release
c/o Beverly Howard
205 Canyon Rim Dr
Austin, TX 78746-5016
USA
If you prefer to wait until we have a distributor and/or the ability to accept payments by credit card, email me by clicking here.
You may also contact me by phone at 512-327-3230 between
9am-8pm
central time.
Based on a decade of personal experience with many different EBook formats, and, especially the problems accessing encrypted EBooks, we have decided to use Adobe's Acrobat "PDF" format and to provide in without using encryption or DRM protection.
A year of experimenting with this book alone also underscored the need to use a reader that allowed fast loading and 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 to navigate quickly from one part of the book to another.
From the start, my primary goal was to provide a usable reference book that was installable on a PDA to give the readers the ability to easily take the information with them and access it anywhere, including the cockpit of a two seat training aircraft. To this end, the EBook is fully "tagged" using Acrobat tools that allow full access using the small PocketPC or Palm Screen.
In addition to PocketPC's this text book is also readable on any Palm, PC, Mac or Linux, Symbian (Nokia), Sun, AIX, HP-UX or even OS/2 computers using one of the many Acrobat reader versions available from Adobe's Download site on the Web.
The textbook Acrobat file is also configured to allow printing all or part of the book as long as the printed output is for the owner's exclusive use. 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 Windows Acrobat Reader as well as the PocketPC Acrobat Readers on the disk that can be installed directly from the CD by simply clicking on the installation links in the startup page, has additional WWW links to download the readers for other computing platforms.
While this release is in Adobe Acrobat format, I am completely open to discuss any input on releasing it in other non editable formats.
Thanks
to Bill Strohmeier, the stats on Hawthorne Field in Orangeburg,, where
the need for this book was demonstrated during the training of
thousands
of aviation cadets for flight operations throughout WWII, are that the
school was in operation from October 4, 1941 through October 12, 1945
ending
with the French class 46b. Each cadet class spent two months in
training
six days a week and the graduates logged 65 hours of flight time by the
end of the course. Hawthorne Field was the last contract school
to
be closed after VJ Day.
A total of 329,332 hours were logged by 4272 American cadets, most with no aviation experience, of which 2965 graduated. 1,652 French cadets were trained of which 1,163 graduated. The safety record was also impressive with only one American fatality and two French during the entire history of the school.
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.
Going through this legal process while the Sonny Bono copyright extension to 70 years and the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) were in the headlines 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 their legal copyright issues that remain 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 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.