At 99 years old, Charles Cone still remembers what it felt like to lift off the ground for the first time. He can still get himself into a cockpit—a fact he proved to a third-grade class years after most pilots had retired from flying. That lifelong passion for aviation lies at the heart of his memoir, A Burning Desire to Fly.
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 28th Jul 2026 – Born in a farmhouse in Wyoming County, New York, in January 1926, Cone’s story begins not with airplanes but with hardship: his mother died two weeks after his birth, and he came of age on a struggling family farm during the Great Depression. That resilience carried him into the Navy during World War II, where he trained as a pilot and flew combat and patrol missions across the Pacific, weathering a typhoon and the fighting at Saipan along the way.
The memoir does not stop there. Cone flew combat missions in Korea, then spent the Cold War at the controls of Strategic Air Command bombers—the B-47 and the B-52—living through DEFCON alerts and the constant readiness that defined a generation of military pilots. He prepared for deployment during the Vietnam War, married his wife, Jo, and raised a family across a string of military postings, with flying remaining the one constant thread running through it all.
Written originally for his children and grandchildren, A Burning Desire to Fly has become a firsthand account of nearly a century of American history—the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars—as seen from the cockpit rather than the history books. The book closes with reflections from Cone’s own children, who describe growing up in a military family shaped by his years in uniform and his refusal, even in retirement, to fully come back down to earth.
“As long as I can get into the cockpit,” Cone reportedly told a young student who asked how much longer he planned to fly. He was closing in on 99. He was still flying.
A Burning Desire to Fly offers readers an unvarnished look at what it meant to serve—and to fly—across nearly every major American conflict of the twentieth century, told by a man who lived it firsthand.
Charles Cone is a retired military pilot whose career spanned World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. He continues to share his experiences with family, students, and fellow pilots. This is his first memoir.
A Burning Desire to Fly is available through Amazon and other major digital bookstores.
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