When a Dream Lasts a Lifetime: Charles Cone’s A Burning Desire to Fly
A single thread of purpose runs through A Burning Desire to Fly: the conviction, tested by the Great Depression, World War II, and the ordinary erosions of a long life, that a dream pursued with enough determination can be lived.
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 28th Jul 2026 – Charles Cone made himself a promise as a boy on a New York farm in the 1930s and spent the next eight decades fulfilling it—through Navy flight training, combat missions over the Pacific and Korea, Cold War bomber duty with Strategic Air Command, and, decades later, a cockpit he still climbed into at ninety-nine.
Cone was born on a small farm in upstate New York in 1926, just two weeks before his mother’s death, into a poverty so lean that his family had no bank account and debt because there was no money for ...