title: Hunting Warbirds: The Obsessive Quest for the Lost Aircraft of World War II
author:  Carl Hoffman 
description: Sent to Greenland by Smithsonian magazine to write a piece about Navy P-3 Orion aircraft and their search for submarines, freelance journalist Hoffman was taken up by the crew he was interviewing, with a detour past the ruins of a WWII-era B-29 "Flying Fortress," the Kee Bird. Hoffman became hooked, and he found he was not alone in his obsession about the downed plane, which had crashed at the edge of a lake 40 years earlier, and was nearly perfectly preserved. In a painstaking blow-by-blow reconstruction, Hoffman charts three separate expeditions that were made by an assortment of amateur obsessives to salvage read: restore and fly the Kee Bird, writing in the first person when he went along on a trip, and in the third when recounting the adventures of the diverse subculture of plane salvagers when he couldn't. Their efforts go for naught, and anyone who doesn't already have the flier bug will have shut the book before the marooned bird's engines catch and then catch fire. Written with assurance, Hoffman's debut will certainly hold the buff market rapt, and will also find some readers of extreme sports and travel narratives, but it doesn't have the breadth to break out, though a 5-city author tour could help draw in readers. </P><P>Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.</P>
zlib_text: **DEALER’S**
  
   **CHOICE**
  
   **A Wild Cards mosaic novel**
  
  _edited by_
  
   _George R.R. Martin_
  
  _assistant editor_
  
   _Melinda M. Snodgrass_
  
  _and written by_
  
   _Stephen Leigh_
  
   _Edward W. Bryant_
  
   _John J. Miller_
  
   _Walter Jon Williams_
  
   _George R.R. Martin_
  
  ___to mom with love_
  
  __**FRIDAY MORNING**
  
   **September 21, 1990**
  
  Frontier Airlines flight 8, Los Angeles to Newark, raced to beat the morning,
  to meet the sun. It would lose, but only slightly. At 39,000 feet, the sky was
  spangled with other suns. They twinkled significantly less than they would if
  seen from the ground.
  
  The man in 14A pressed his broad forehead against the cold window. He could
  pick out no familiar constellation. He hadn’t expected to. Still, he missed
  the southern cross, as the Europeans called it. To him it was the great
  mirragen, the hunting cat with claws spread, leaping upon its prey.
  
  Hunting… He wondered if his weapons were still intact in his checked bag, deep
  in the belly of the 747. It wasn’t as 