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Philip J Latz - Author/Technical Writer
Phil J Latz is a mechanic, underground mine worker, licenced aircraft engineer on fixed and rotary wing types. He is a professional pilot, a technical writer, creative author, publisher of his own work, and a woodworker. Over 20 years flying, training and management tasks worldwide followed, plus many house and country moves overseas. His book covers life and love, divorce, loneliness and different cultures, customs, in addition to aspects of aviation. |
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Phil grew up in the desert among the indigenous people of Central Australia where supplies and mail arrived by pack camel. His secondary schooling and employment were 1600 km away from home. Notwithstanding, he graduated in many differing fields of endeavour while working around Australia and learning to fly and maintain aeroplanes and helicopters.
Throwing spears and boomerangs at each other, eating snakes, lizards and wichetty grubs. These are among Phil's - a 3rd generation Australian - childhood memories while growing up with indigenous kids in Central Australia at isolated Hermannsburg Mission in the 1940's. The early exercises in survival developed sharp reflexes. These and his guardian angel helped save him many times. Lack of a vehicle, electricity and refrigeration meant transport was by horse and camel.
Later, correspondence school lessons arrived by air, which introduced Phil to aviation at an early age. Witnessing the mail plane crash at age nine didn't put him off flying. His totem is a `Flying Termite.' |
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After boarding school, Phil served a seven-year apprenticeship in the motor industry. Then he began learning four new professions - maintaining and piloting both fixed and rotary wing aircraft, which entailed many interstate moves and job changes. He did night school and studied until the age of 28, which resulted in enviable qualifications and a great choice of employment opportunities.
The world beckoned, he skied in Europe, married into `society' in England and became a professional expatriate, operating helicopters worldwide. Based in Singapore, Phil employed specialist pilots from New Zealand to Norway, Canada to China - they flew choppers wherever the Company had work.
Flying With My Angel - surviving religion, sex and helicopters describes how Phil, feral, bushy, rejected religious dogma and embraced spirituality, became a playboy, then parent, bankrupt and divorcee. Maxims 5 star eatery and malaria, mile high jinks and misery, desperate loneliness and deprivation in miserable waterless or flooded outposts, and more - all are part of Phil's life journey, described in his book.
Phil has been published in various magazines with worldwide distribution and was also responsible for producing certified English language manuals for several large Russian helicopters. He has compiled a world exclusive CD containing `translations' of operating aspects, limits and photographs of the Mil Mi 26, the world's largest helicopter.
Phil J Latz is now happily retired with his long term partner, in Northern NSW, Australia. |
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NEWS ITEMS:
Attended creative writing and several life writing courses
Member of the Australian Society of Authors, Brisbane Polo Club
Has been repeatedly published in Australian Aviation magazine
Had a series printed in Helinews magazine until August 2007
Several more features again published in 2008
Invited guest speaker at Rotary, Quota and View Clubs
Had his book converted to inches - it's available on Amazon
(B & W graphics only)
CONTACT DETAILS:
pjlatz2@tadaust.org.au
BOOK AND CD AVAILABLE:
www.phillatz.com |
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REVIEW:
Coming of Age Over a Lifetime - Reviewed by Michael Rabiger
This is a remarkably candid self-portrait that begins in a bubble of leftover 19th century Australian outback. Latz has an unerring, inexhaustible drive to remake himself and a never-ending appetite for nurturing machinery. There's lots of drinking, lots of enticing girls, and lots of aircraft problems that summon his ingenious solutions. By testing himself at extremes, he passes through many incarnations, each time jettisoning the identity that others would like him to occupy. By far the hardest abandonment is leaving the religion of his parents, and all the visceral restrictions that go with it. Graduating from cars to planes to helicopters, then to bigger and bigger helicopters, he redefines himself as if rising up a ladder a rung at a time. It's some sort of 20th century hunting and gathering whose principle he must have acquired from the aboriginal people he grew up with. Its momentum, however, leaves no time for contemplation and family life. The reckoning for all this comes when his wife leaves him. The writing is spare and functional, like the life it describes. My wife and I both had the same reaction: we literally couldn't put it down. The flow of the book is addictive, and its honesty remarkable. The subtext is dancing with death, and escaping over and over again--with the uncanny implication that Latz has not escaped religion at all. He's simply redefined it through living. One cannot evade a spiritual dimension no matter how rationally and scientifically one lives. Some force which he calls an angel has cared for him, and now it's time to look around. There are rules to the universe and Latz, unknown to himself, finds that he plays by them--and the universe responds in kind. |
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PHIL J LATZ - Author/Technical Writer |
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