Baling out

When a crippled aircraft can no longer be saved, a pilot or crew member may have one option left: leaving the cockpit by parachute. The act is frightening, and it is attempted only as a last resort, with no assurance of living through it. Some airmen were caught in burning parachutes above their heads, some were shot at while swinging toward the ground, some landed among mines and were torn apart, and others hung dead in tree branches.

Still, many did survive. Some went back into combat, and others were taken as prisoners of war. Robert Jackson gathers their accounts, in which fortune, resourcefulness and sheer refusal to give up often decided the outcome. The escapes come from damaged German, British and American aircraft, and the book also covers the pioneering pilots who used parachutes in the First World War and the remarkable bail-outs of the years between the wars.