Richard Hess was an only child when his parents divorced, he was still a toddler. His mother remarried, and he took his stepfather's name, growing up on the streets of New York. It's not the origin story most readers expect from a fighter pilot, and that's exactly the point: Richard's writing doesn't skip the hard parts.
He spent 28 years in the United States Air Force, flying high-performance jets through nine war zones and more countries than he can easily count. He went on to fly commercially as an airline captain, and spent fifteen years as an international military adviser through the U.S. State Department. Along the way, he wrote dozens of articles for Warbird Digest on aircraft safety, maintenance, and international ferry missions. Today, nearly fifty years after he first took the controls, he still flies and he owns and operates five aviation-related businesses, including International Jets, Inc.

None of that happened without a family behind him. Richard has been married to his wife for 51 years, and together they raised three children across six states as his career kept them moving. Somewhere in between deployments and relocations, he also earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics, an MBA, and studied law proof that the same discipline that kept him sharp in a cockpit shows up everywhere else in his life.

Richard started writing what would become High Flight: A Pilot's Journey Through Life more than fifteen years ago, then set it aside for over a decade while he built his businesses. When he finally finished it, he didn't write the kind of memoir pilots usually write heavy on daring, light on feeling. He let readers see his feelings, his failings, and his mistakes, not just his flight log.
That same honesty carried into Night of the Bear, a military thriller he co-wrote with fellow aviator Alan Cockrell, drawing on the two authors' combined half-century-plus of flight experience. Readers have compared it to Tom Clancy's earliest thrillers and to shows like Homeland and 24.

Richard isn't finished. His next novel, Red Tide, is due out in October 2026, and he's already begun work on another, Tsarkakewa Afirka. After a lifetime spent flying other people's missions military, commercial, diplomatic he's finally flying his own.

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