Key West Author Teams Up With CIA Pilot to Produce an Aviation Adventure

Local Key West author Luann Grosscup had a chance encounter three years ago with former CIA/Air America pilot, Neil Hansen.  Grosscup, a former Chicago Tribune features freelancer, was covering Capt. Hansen’s presentation at the annual Oshkosh AirVenture Worldwide Fly-In.

When Hansen mentioned he had a manuscript written for a book project and asked Grosscup to take a look at it, she was initially reluctant, but politely agreed.

“It probably sounds rude of me,” Grosscup said, “but I’m often reluctant to look at someone’s manuscript because people have given me stuff to look at that is poorly written and I hate to hurt their feelings.  But this time was different.  I was blown away by the quality of what he had already written.  I could not put it down.”

Grosscup and Hansen put their heads together and set about fleshing out the book.  Grosscup said she wrote four chapters and edited the book.  The two were thrilled when it was accepted by literary agent Bob Diforio, who later found them a publisher.  “FLIGHT  An Air America PIlot’s Story of Adventure, Descent and Redemption” (History Publishing Company, 2019), is Air America Capt. Neil Hansen’s story.

The flight crews from the CIA’s secret airline operated in the skies over Vietnam and Laos not as military, but as civilian “shadow warriors.”  The existence of Air America remains largely unkown to much of the America public to this day.

Hansen began his aviation career as a pilot for Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. He spent more than a decade in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War era as a captain for Air America  during the Vietnam era and the ‘Secret War’ in Laos. Neil reveled in the risky flying that fed his adrenaline addiction.  Upon returning to the States, ultimately unable to find work and unable to let go of the Air America exhilaration rush, he saw the profession he loved come to an end when his trajectory veered off course. culminating in a sentence at a federal prison.

The historical aviation narrative incorporates the pathos of a war zone, humor, and candid insight. Hansen tells all.  He pulls the reader directly into the cockpit, onto dirt mountaintop landing strips, into the raunchy brothels of Laos, alongside his first toddling steps into Buddhism, aboard the plane he flew out of Cambodia hours before it fell to the Khmer Rouge, down the road of self-destruction and beside him as he regains a foothold on the path to integrity.

“FLIGHT  An Air America Pilot’s Story of Adventure, Descent and Redemption” is available through major booksellers, or online at Amazon.com.

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