Rowland White has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is Vulcan 607.
Vulcan 607
Summary
Random House presents the audiobook edition of Vulcan 607 by Rowland White, read by Roy McMillan. It was to be one of the most ambitious operations since 617 Squadron bounced their revolutionary bombs into the dams of the Ruhr Valley in 1943.... When Argentine forces invaded the Falklands in the early hours of 2 April 1982, Britain's military chiefs were faced with a real-life Mission Impossible. Its opening shot, they decided, would be Operation Black Buck: to strike a body blow at the occupying army and make them realise that nothing was safe - not even Buenos Aires.... The idea was simple: to destroy the vital landing strip at Port Stanley. The reality was more complicated. The only aircraft that could possibly do the job was three months from being scrapped, and the distance it had to travel was 4,000 miles beyond its maximum range. It would take 15 Victor tankers and 17 separate in-flight refuellings to get one Avro Vulcan B2 over the target and give its crew any chance of coming back alive. Yet less than a month later, a formation of elderly British jets was launched from a remote island airbase to carry out the longest-range air attack in history. At the tip of the spear was a single aircraft, six men, and 21 thousand-pound bombs, facing a hornet's nest of modern weaponry: the radar-guided guns and missiles of the Argentine defences. There would be no second chances. It was the end of an era - the last time the RAF flew heavy bombers into combat before they were replaced by their digital, fly-by-wire, laser-guided successors. There were many who believed it couldn't be done. Drawing on extensive interviews with the combatants, Falklands residents and British High Command, and with unprecedented access to contemporary military records, Rowland White takes us, for the first time, to the beating heart of the legendary raid. Vulcan 607 is a story of ingenuity, courage and sheer bloody-mindedness that's destined to become a classic.
©2010 Rowland White (P)2018 Random House Audiobooks
Into the Black
Summary
On 12th April 1981 a revolutionary new spacecraft blasted off from Florida on her maiden flight. NASA's Space Shuttle Columbia was the most advanced flying machine ever built - the high watermark of post-war aviation development. A direct descendant of the record-breaking X-planes the likes of which Chuck Yeager had tested in the skies over the Mojave Desert, Columbia was a winged rocket plane, the size of an airliner, capable of flying to space and back before being made ready to fly again. She was the world's first real spaceship. The Shuttle's Commander, moonwalker John Young, was already a veteran of five spaceflights. Alongside him, Pilot Bob Crippen was making his first, but Crip, taken in by the space agency after the cancellation of a top secret military space station programme in 1969, had worked on the Shuttle's development for a decade. Never before had a crew been so well prepared for their mission. Yet less than an hour after Young and Crippen's spectacular departure from the Cape it was clear that all was not well. Tiles designed to protect Columbia from the blowtorch burn of re-entry were missing from the heatshield. If the damage to their ship was too great the astronauts would be unable to return safely to earth. But neither they nor mission control possessed any way of knowing. Instead, NASA turned to the National Reconnaissance Office, a spy agency hidden deep inside the Pentagon whose very existence was classified. Into the Black is a thrilling race against time; a gripping high stakes cold-war story, and a celebration of a beyond the state-of-the-art machine that, hailed as one of the seven new wonders of the world, rekindled our passion for spaceflight. With a foreword by Astronaut Richard Truly. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2016 Rowland White (P)2016 Random House AudioBooks