Squadron Airborne brings alive the actions of fighter pilots, ground staff, and auxiliary personnel at a fictional Spitfire fighter-plane squadron in September 1940.

Peter Stuyckes is a nineteen-year-old who has just finished his training as a pilot for England’s Royal Air Force (RAF) when he arrives at an aerodrome called Westhill near the town of Melford, England. There he joins an established squadron already in the thick of the fighting but with a less-than-stunning first flight in front of his new colleagues. Stuyckes doesn’t know it then, but he is to become part of what will be called the Battle of Britain, the first major military campaign fought entirely by air forces.

In the midst of casualties and survivors, battle fatigue and botched landings, parachute escapes and pilots shot down during aerial battles, members of the ground crew hasten to repair the Spitfire planes that make it back, proudly tallying their pilots’ strikes. It all takes place along with romantic encounters in between, until the squadron prepares to leave for rest and refit at Lincolnshire, after which a new squadron will take their place.

Elleston Trevor, who was himself a member of the RAF, takes the reader into the action of one week during the Battle of Britain in this tense, exciting, and realistic story.

They are twelve men who shouldn’t be alive. They have survived the sudden blinding sandstorm that crippled their air freighter; survived a desperate crash landing in the Sahara of Central Libya; survived to face the slow, dry, agonizing death of the desert, for no rescue plans will seek their unscheduled flight.

Twelve men with one hope: to build a new plane from the wreckage of their Skytruck and make a flight out of hell, two hundred miles to the nearest oasis.

Only one man could build such a plane: Stringer, the brilliant and obsessed engineer. Only one man could fly it: Towns, the arrogant and tormented pilot. Both had been aboard the Skytruck, but both are mortal enemies whose consuming hatred for each other is a danger greater than the desert itself.

This tale is so riveting it has inspired two major motion pictures–the unforgettable 1965 film starring Jimmy Stewart and the 2004 film starring Dennis Quaid.