Bill Riddle, author of the novel “Dead Downwind,” is scheduled to speak at the Pacific Aviation Museum, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on Feb. 28 at 7 p.m. and March 1 at 2 p.m. He will be signing books at both times.
Riddle, described as “a spellbinding storyteller” by the museum’s KT Budd-Jones, will talk about Cdr. John Rogers’ daring and almost disastrous flight from California to Hawaii in 1925. It was the first of the epic early flights to Hawaii from the U.S. West Coast and was the result of a rivalry between a young Army Air Corps general, Billy Mitchell, and Hawaii-based Commander Rogers. Rogers took on the then-death-defying mission of leading three wood and canvas biplanes on the pioneering trans-Pacific flight from California.