Five Hundred Feet Above Alaska

The Heart-Stopping Adventure Novel of an Alaskan Bush Pilot

By: Robert M. Brantner

Narrated by: Robert M. Brantner

Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

International #1 Amazon Bestseller

Foreword by Norman Y Mineta. Five Hundred Feet Above Alaska is the story of Peter Connors, a young man who moves to Alaska in pursuit of his dream of becoming a commercial pilot. While the pilots in Alaska are known for their superior airmanship, they are also famous for their disregard of the rules that govern them. Determined to ultimately be an airline pilot in “the lower forty-eight,” Peter vows to walk the straight and narrow. Yet, when Peter is the only pilot available to rescue a comrade who crashed in the snow-covered tundra, he is forced to compromise the very ethics that define him.

Over time, Peter’s competence begins to overpower his regard for the rules. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Peter begins a downward spiral. The life Peter had carefully constructed for himself is at odds with the “live or die” flying of Alaska. Over the course of a year of doing battle with the elements on a daily basis, armed only with his plane, his wits and his skill to bring him home every night, Peter must decide whether it is more important to embrace life or cheat death.

©2019 Robert M. Brantner (P)2022 Robert M. Brantner

Great premise

Great premise for a story but I feel like the author was amateurish.
it's got potential to be a great book but I think my issue is the narration! the wrong narrator can make a good book bad and vice versa. In this case I feel this story has the wrong narrator even tho it's supposed to be the author himself. I'm going to buy the book to read myself to see if it's the writing or the narrator that makes the story amateurish.

in closing I like the plot and the story idea but unless your a teenager I don't think this is a adult novel as it's written in a way that reminds me of reading the hatchet or a ol hardy Boys book. the word Choices make the characters seem like they are 13 year Olds who sneak beer and talk about girls vs young adults who are young adults.

Basic Entertainment

Gary Paulson meets cheeseball aviation writing meets Christian young adult fiction. However, this is the most vivid depiction of village sled flying that I've ever come across, a window into a small, dark corner of aviation that most know nothing about. While published as a novel, the anecdotes no doubt draw heavily on the author's experience on the peninsula as a low-time pilot building hours. One major fact-check though...the word "bush pilot" is used heavily throughout the book, and village pilots categorically do not refer to themselves as bush pilots, and would be ridiculed if they did so. Despite flying around bush areas, the term "bush pilot" is really only applied to off-airport operations such as landing on lakes and gravel bars (and the term is really not used in Alaska...you'll never hear a bush pilot in Alaska refer to themselves as such, at least while in the state). I had a 28-hr drive, so this book was tolerable enough to get through, but between the juvenile writing style and the narrator's overuse of license with the voices, I had to set it down a few times.