I half rolled, and there before my eyes was as perfect a target as I had ever seen in my life. A pressure of a thumb, a short burst, a puff of smoke, a flash of flame, a hole on the clouds - and it was over.' - Lieutenant Robert McKenzie, No. 2 Squadron Australian Flying Corps.
When the First World War broke out in August 1914, aeroplanes were a novelty, barely a decade old. Despite this Australia became one of the only nations outside Europe to establish a military flying school - the Australian Flying Corps. Its first class of four student pilots would grow to number almost 4000 by the armistice. The young men who volunteered for service as pilots became pioneers in a completely new dimension of warfare as they struggled for control of the skies over the battlefields of the Western Front, Palestine and Mesopotamia.
Using private letters, diaries and official records, historian Michael Molkentin reveals, for the first time in over 90 years, the remarkable story of the airmen and mechanics of the Australian Flying Corps. It is a tale of heroism and endurance; of a war fought thousands of feet above the trenches in aircraft of timber and fabric without radios, parachutes or oxygen. Fire in the Sky takes readers up into this chaotic tumult among the clouds and into the midst of a war from which only one in two Australian airmen emerged unscathed.
