Surprising encounters in literature?

I recently read the memoir Boy and Going Solo by Roald Dahl. A very enjoyable read it was too. Not altogether a complete surprise, (as I had obviously seen the cover blurb) that the second part of the book covered Dahl's experience as a fighter pilot in the RAF during the Second World War. He tells of his time in training and then the Western Desert campaign in 1941, swiftly followed with his exploits in the Greece debacle as British forces hastily withdrew following Germany's invasion.

It's a good read. But it occured to me - have any other readers ever encountered unexpectedly lengthy passages or whole sections of books where the author tells of aerial combat and the like? Off the top of my head - The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje comes to mind as one I suppose. Any others?

There is a chapter in Yeats-Brown The Lives of a Bengal Lancer relating his time as an observer in Mesopotamia during WW1. It is followed by a chapter as PoW in Turkey...

Sure, "The Red Knight of Germany" is riddled with first hand aerial combat accounts.

Re: "The Red Knight of Germany" - but it is not non-aviation literature in the sense referred to in the original message. Although, I did read it very many years ago and it struck me that there was a good deal of fiction in it.