Thanks to their miles-high vantage point, aviators develop an outsider’s perspective of life on the ground, like the Apollo 17 astronauts who saw the earth looking like a “blue marble.”

In his memoir, former U.S. Air Force and airline pilot Richard Hess takes the broad view. "High Flight: A Pilot’s Journey Through Life" is an all-encompassing story of adventure and travel interwoven with details of family, friends and faith.

When retired pilots tell their stories, they often stress the “derring-do” and skip the personal, but “Rich has shown us his feelings, his failings and his mistakes,” writes Capt. Alan Cockrell, retired United Airlines pilot and author, in "High Flight’s" foreword.

Hess’s first chapter jumps right into the personal. “Our feelings are like the clothing we carry in a suitcase. If we pack too many negative feelings, the suitcase becomes heavy baggage that weighs us down and hinders us.”

The only child of parents who divorced when he was a toddler, his growing-up years alone would be enough for another book. His maternal grandparents loved and treated him like a son, but his mother remarried and his stepfather believed in frequent corporal punishment. Hess’s mother married two more times, and through it all, Hess struggled to reconnect with his real father.

After a year in the Merchant Marine Academy (a “graduate-level introduction to hazing and abuse”), Hess transferred to the State University of New York at Stony Brook. By age 20 and feeling restless, he accompanied a friend to the local Air Force recruiting office and “the next thing I knew, I had a pen in my hand and an enlistment contract in front of me.” Soon, Hess was boarding a plane to Texas for basic training. The first flight of his life it was “the start of a beautiful relationship.”

Readers curious about what it takes to become a pilot will find Hess’s journey enlightening. After boot camp, his assignments included computer operator at Ent Air Force Base in Colorado Springs; an ROTC post in Miami; and undergraduate pilot training at Vance AFB in Enid, Oklahoma, where military pilot instruction included courses in weather, navigation, aerodynamics, aerobatics, instruments and formation flying.

By the early 1980s, he was an Air Force commander with the 18th Military Airlift Squadron flying to conflicts or relief efforts around the world. The squadron brought home victims of the Jonestown massacre from Guyana. They supported Chad in North Africa “when Gaddafi was stirring up trouble,” airlifted Special Forces in and out of Central America when the Sandinistas controlled Nicaragua, and retrieved bodies from the barracks bombing in Beirut. Part of the Grenada invasion, they afterwards flew loads of Soviet armament back to Washington, “so the world could learn how the Russians were planning to cause trouble throughout Latin America.”

Time spent away from his family in dangerous situations worried both Hess and his wife. He turned down a job offer with the Secret Service and NASA’s Space Shuttle program and accepted a position as an instructor pilot in Texas, training future fighter pilots from NATO countries.

In 1987, Hess took a job with Delta Air Lines and started ground school in Atlanta. About the same time, he began a 12-year stint with the Mississippi Air National Guard and flew in Desert Storm and post-9/11 Middle East operations. He retired from Delta in 2018 and topped off his career by developing several aviation businesses and flying for a variety of clients.

The second half of the book is filled with details of his international travels ferrying planes from sellers to buyers across the North Atlantic, South America and Africa. In his career, which included 28 years in the military, he accumulated 28,000 flight hours.

Aircraft buffs will devour this book. Hess mentions dozens of different kinds of planes: the T-37 twin-engine jet, T-38 supersonic jet, the F-15 Eagle, the C-141 Starlifter, the A-10 Warthog and military aircraft from 10 foreign countries, plus dozens of commercial and private planes.

Any reader of "High Flight" will find a good story. Interspersed with the technicalities are Hess’s memories of his growing family, and how he and his wife and three children moved multiple times to live in Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Maine, Massachusetts and Georgia. Through it all, he also earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics and an MBA.

Hess also recounts relationships with many, many individuals he encountered around the world, from airplane mechanics to corporate moguls. “People come and people go in your life. Some stay for a very long time, some only stay for a short while. Each relationship serves a purpose, although you may not know what that purpose is until much later,” he writes.

He dedicates his book to his wife of 50 years, Rosann. “Who else could have tolerated my absences while I was gallivanting the globe?”