A Lifetime in the Cockpit: Charles Cone Reflects on Nearly a Century of Flight
At 99 years old, Charles Cone still remembers what it felt like to lift off the ground for the first time. He can still get himself into a cockpit—a fact he proved to a third-grade class years after most pilots had retired from flying. That lifelong passion for aviation lies at the heart of his memoir, A Burning Desire to Fly.
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 28th Jul 2026 – Born in a farmhouse in Wyoming County, New York, in January 1926, Cone’s story begins not with airplanes but with hardship: his mother died two weeks after his birth, and he came of age on a struggling family farm during the Great Depression. That resilience carried him into the Navy during World War II, where he trained as a pilot and flew combat and patrol missions across the Pacific, weathering a typhoon and th...
