title: Slipping the Surly Bonds: Great Quotations on Flight
author:  Dave English 
description: "Slipping the Surly Bonds is the coffee-table, Christmas and birthday gift aviation fans have been looking for...better buy a few copies of this book; one to keep...the other to give away..." (<i>Aviation International News</i> 1998-10-10)
zlib_text: # • I •
  
  
  GOLD-BRAIDED FLIGHT CAP carefully adjusted to a rakish angle, a freshly suave
  and debonair Captain Lando Calrissian bounded down the boarding ramp of the
  ultra-lightspeed freighter _Millennium Falcon_ —and cracked his forehead
  painfully on the hatchcoaming.
  
  
  “Ouch! By the Eternal!” Staggered, he glanced discreetly around, making sure
  no one had seen him, and sighed. Now what the deuce _was_ it Ground Control
  had wanted him to look at?
  
  
  They’d put it rather ungenteelly …
  
  
  “ _What’s that garbage on your thrust-intermix cowling_ , Em Falcon, _over_?”
  
  
  Well, it _had_ been something they could say without insulting references to
  the amateurish way he’d skidded, setting her down on the Teguta Lusat tarmac.
  Atmospheric entry hadn’t been anything to brag about, either. Gambler he may
  have been, scoundrel perhaps, and what he _preferred_ thinking of as “con
  _artiste_.”
  
  
  But ship-handler he was definitely not.
  
  
  He frowned, reminded of that rental pilot droid he’d wasted a substan