Tonight I was browsing in the military section of a Chapters bookstore close to home (american folks should read Barnes & Noble) when I bumped into a book that I didn’t know.

It’s called “Phoenix Squadron” and tells the dramatic story of a mission undertaken in 1972 by Britain’s aircraft carrier, HMS Ark Royal, in a 1,500 mile dash across the Atlantic to defend British Honduras (now Belize) which was being threatened with invasion.

Ark Royal was an aging Audacious-class aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy and, when she was decommissioned in 1978, was its last remaining conventional catapult and arrested-landing aircraft carrier. She was the world’s first aircraft carrier to be commissioned with an angled flight deck, preceding the first American carrier with this feature, USS Forrestal, by nine months.

Rowland White (the author) puts you into the cockpits of Buccaneer and Phantom fighter jets during a night landing in bad weather and with the carrier deck pitching violently. This is the stuff I like to read so it’s now officially added in this website’s virtual bookshelf.