In Contrails over the Mojave George Marrett takes off where Tom Wolfes The Right Stuff ended in 1963. Marrett started the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB only two weeks after the schools commander Col. Chuck Yeager ejected from a Lockheed NF104 trying to set a world altitude record. He describes life as a space cadet experiencing 15 Gs in a human centrifuge zeroG maneuvers in a KC135 Vomit Comet and a flight to 80000 feet in the F104A Starfighter. After graduating from Yeagers Charm School he was assigned to the Fighter Branch of Flight Test Operations where he flew the latest fighter aircraft and chased other test aircraft as they set world speed and altitude records. Marrett takes readers into the cockpit as he goes vertical in a T38 Talon completes highG maneuvers in an F4C Phantom and conducts wetrunway landing tests in the accidentprone F111A Aardvark. He writes about Col. Silver Fox Stephens setting a world speed record in the YF12 Blackbird and Bob Gilliland testing speed stalls in the SR71 spy plane but he also relives stories of crashes that killed test pilot friends. He recounts deadsticking a T38 to a landing on Rogers Dry Lake after a twinengine failure and conducting dangerous tail hook barrier testing in a fighter jet without a canopy. A mysterious UFO sighting in the night sky above the Mojave Desert known as The Edwards Encounter also receives Marretts attention. Whether the author is assessing a new aircrafts performance or describing the experiences of test pilots as they routinely faced the possibility of death this look at the golden age of flight testing both thrills and informs.