Ken's book of historic Perthshire flyers sold to help tomorrow's young pilots

dailyrecord.co.uk:

An expert on the history of flying in Perthshire has offered all the proceeds from a new book to help young trainees meet the high cost of learning to fly or follow a flight engineering career.Author Ken Bruce is passionate about planes, but a health scare last year made him think seriously about the future of his research.He came up with the idea of putting everything in one big book, a reference sort of book.“I decided to create a ‘big book’ on Amazon,” Perth man Ken explained. “I titled it ‘Aviation in Perthshire - People, Places and Planes’.”Ken’s motivation for putting his research on Perthshire aviation history in one place was simple - people were starting to forget.“The reason I started writing about these historic, heroic aviators was that I wanted them to be forever remembered,” he said.“My generation is the last one that knew these people, they lived amongst us.

All that I could see was their initials and names on war memorials, their stories were being forgotten by time.“Apart from a dedicated, dwindling number of people trying to preserve their memory, not many of our community knew exactly how heroic, how much they sacrificed, who they really were and how dangerous were the missions they took part in during the wars.”Five copies of the reference work are at AK Bell Library in Perth.Recently he decided to take this further and reissue the book as a special edition of over 500 pages.“The book contains the full collection of my Perthshire aviation history and aviator stories written for the madeinperth.org website, the Perthshire Advertiser newspaper and my book, Where Sky and Summit Meet, published by Tippermuir Books in Perth,” Ken continued.“Perthshire has a long history of involvement in aviation, from the