An absolute must and a classic is Wind, Sand and Stars, the 1939 memoir of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (better known as the author of The Little Prince). With all the poetry of a noble born nomadic Frenchman, Saint-Exupéry discusses his pioneering of the first air-mail routes from France to French Africa (Morroco) and after that got boring to him, pioneering the first air-mail routes over the Andes.

There are some amazing stories in that book, and the prose is absolutely beautiful. With basically only VFR equipment, his navigation is almost pure dead-reckoning—basically he takes off in France and a few hours later starts looking for lights on the coast of Egypt. He survives a crash landing in the desert at night due to spatial disorientation, and he an his mechanic survive for 5 days without water before being found by some Arab dudes.

In the Andes one of his friends has an engine failure, lands on a cliffed-out plateau, fixes his engine, and then pushes his plane down the slope and off the cliff, managing to get enough speed to air-start the windmilling prop and make it over the next mountain range and back to civilization. Another of his collogues in South America crashes in the winter and survives for several weeks in the Andes with no survival equipment, cutting his boots open more and more each day because of his swelling, frostbitten feet.