Sky Birds Dare! (audiobook) by L. Ron Hubbard

Lots of Fun!

Duration: 1 hour, 50 minutes
Multicast Performance
Published by Galaxy Press

First published in 1936, Sky Birds Dare! is part of a large series of books and stories that are being re-published by Galaxy Press as part of their Golden Age Stories series. In reality, they are a collection of L. Ron Hubbard's early works that were published in magazines and as pulp fiction books. Hubbard was a prolific writer and he wrote a lot of action stories that translate quite well into the multicast performance audiobook format.



Sky Birds Dare! is the story of Breeze Callahan, a young glider pilot who is convinced that the U.S. military's pilots could learn a lot from learning how to pilot gliders before they fly motorized aircraft. A glider is like a small plane that has no engine and is towed into the air by a motorized plane or by a car with a rope (much like a person running with a kite trailing behind). Callahan and his mentor Pop Donegon are thwarted over and over again by Badger O'Dowell, a rival that wants to sell the military his conventional motorized training planes.

This is not a subtle story - there are no shades of grey. But, it is a fun story and there is plenty of adventure, danger and brawling - all of which was surprisingly entertaining for me, a listener with absolutely no experience with flying a plane. Hubbard's extensive experience as a glider pilot shines through as he explains it all while telling the story. I was particularly intrigued by his suggestion that gliders could be used to insert soldiers behind enemy lines. We did that 8 years after he published this story during the D-Day invasion in June of 1944.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.

Reviewed on October 19, 2011.