Stephen Harrison-Thomas had been a Royal Navy Sea Harrier pilot in the Falklands War before he was twenty-two. He had flown combat missions from HMS Invincible, fought enemy aircraft over the South Atlantic, survived hostile fire, and been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

For a young fighter pilot, it should have been the beginning of a long naval career.

Instead, the Navy let him go.

Civilian Skies tells the extraordinary story of what came next: the restless, funny, painful, and often chaotic years between the Falklands War and Colombia’s cocaine war.

Leaving the Royal Navy behind, Harrison-Thomas enters civilian life with the same energy that once carried him into combat — but civilian life proves anything but simple. He becomes an airline pilot with Air UK, flies the BAe 146, Boeing 737 and Boeing 767, and eventually joins KLM on international long-haul routes to South America. From the outside, it looks like success: command, status, travel, money, and the prestige of flying wide-body aircraft for one of the world’s great airlines.

But success is not the same as satisfaction.

Along the way he buys houses, opens furniture shops, runs vans and trucks, drives Porsches, buys a Blackpool hotel full of offshore oil workers, battles debt and bureaucracy, survives divorce, fights the Inland Revenue, and briefly becomes “Captain Steve” on daytime television — generating nearly a thousand responses from women who think an airline captain might be the answer to their romantic problems.

It is civilian life, but not as most people know it.

Beneath the comedy and adventure lies a deeper question: how does a former combat pilot replace the danger, purpose, and comradeship of military flying? Airline command gives him responsibility. Business gives him risk. Women give him distraction. But nothing quite replaces the intensity he lost when he left the cockpit of the Sea Harrier.

Then Colombia appears.

At first, Bogotá is just another destination on a KLM route. Soon it becomes something far more powerful: warm, dangerous, seductive, and alive with possibility. A chance meeting with a senior Colombian Air Force officer opens the door to anti-narcotics flying during the cocaine wars — and to a world where Harrison-Thomas’s military past may once again make him useful.

Civilian Skies is the bridge between Falkland Skies and Cocaine Skies: the story of a man trying to become ordinary after war, and discovering that ordinary life will never quite be enough.

A memoir of aviation, reinvention, humour, failure, ambition, women, business disasters, airline flying, and the irresistible pull of danger, Civilian Skies asks one central question:

What do you do when peace feels less like safety than exile?

For Stephen Harrison-Thomas, the answer lay in the skies over Colombia.

And that would become the next adventure.