Harold H. Brown (1924–2023)

I first met Dr. Brown in the Tin Goose Diner at the Port Clinton airport, when he came over to our table to compliment our ride -- the RV-7A built by my student's dad in their garage. Since then, I've seen him speak a number of times and tell many of the tales recounted in this book. He's a great story-teller and Keep Your Airspeed Up is as close as you can get to being in the room with him. What more can you ask of an autobiography?

Meeting someone who made history, as Dr. Brown did being one of the Tuskegee Airmen, is an amazing experience -- heightened even more by our mutual passion for aviation. We shared the boyhood dream of becoming a pilot. What we did not share were the unfair headwinds of a racism that is nearly unimaginable now, more than fifty years downstream from the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Keep Your Airspeed Up brought home the realities of that period of history to me in a way that no other book, movie or even Dr. Brown's own "hangar talks" ever have before. But that was just the beginning of his long career in the Air Force and later in education.

Having shaken history's hand, this book really is the next best thing to being there.… (mer)