Aviation History

Long before the Wright brothers invented the airplane, people have tried everything they could think of to fly. Learn about the long history of flight, starting in ancient China and including everything from hot air balloons to rockets!

The world's worst air disaster happened more than 40 years ago on a remote Atlantic Ocean island, when two fully loaded 747 passenger jets collided after a horrendous series of human errors. One of the jets, KLM Flight 4805, was traveling more than 150 miles an hour and was within seconds of lifting off when it crashed into Pan Am Flight 1736 taxiing in its path. The loss of lives was staggering - 583 dead. The crash happened after a lengthy series of major and minor human errors. In the intervening years, has aviation advanced to the point that such a disaster can't happen again?

Europe has fallen. Pearl Harbor is in flames. Enter: the Eighth. In 1941 the RAF fought a desperate battle of survival against the Luftwaffe over Britain. Then, from across the Atlantic, came a new generation of American pilots, gunners, and bombardiers, a new generation of flying machines called the B-17 Flying Fortress, the B-24 Liberator, the P-47 Thunderbolt, and the P-51 Mustang fighter.

World War II is usually seen as a titanic land battle, decided by mass armies, most importantly those on the Eastern Front. Phillips Payson O'Brien shows us the war in a completely different light. In this compelling new history of the Allied path to victory, he argues that in terms of production, technology, and economic power, the war was far more a contest of air and sea than of land supremacy.

By the author of Ashes Under Water, here is one of the great untold stories of World War II. The Hidden Hindenburg at last reveals the cause of aviation's most famous disaster and the duplicity that kept the truth from coming to light for three generations. It also finally catches up with a German legend who misled the world about the Hindenburg to bury his own Nazi connections.

September 1962: On a moonless night over the raging Atlantic Ocean, a thousand miles from land, the engines of Flying Tiger flight 923 to Germany burst into flames, one by one. Pilot John Murray didn't have long before the plane crashed headlong into the 20-foot waves at 120 mph. As the four flight attendants donned life vests, collected sharp objects, and explained how to brace for the ferocious impact, 68 passengers clung to their seats. They all expected to die.

The Roaring 20s are in full swing and people are living the good life, making money, and having fun. Henry Ford just introduced the forty-hour work week and there is plenty to celebrate. Nobody seems to have a care in the world, except for Elizabeth McNally, who can’t shake the feeling that there are things to fear just over the horizon, even though she can’t explain why. The McNally family is prospering; Thomas, the oldest McNally son, is still being a thorn in the side of Toledo's gangster element with his fearless newspaper coverage of their crimes, while his brother Peter’s garage...

The Few tells the dramatic and unforgettable story of eight young Americans who joined Britain's Royal Air Force, defying their country's neutrality laws and risking their U.S. citizenship to fight side-by-side with England's finest pilots in the summer of 1940—over a year before America entered the war. Flying the lethal and elegant Spitfire, they became "knights of the air" and with minimal training but plenty of guts, they dueled the skilled and fearsome pilots of Germany's Luftwaffe. By October 1940, they had helped England win the greatest air battle in the history of aviation.

The nearly half-million American air crewmen who served during World War II have almost disappeared. And so have their stories. Award-winning writer and former fighter pilot Jay A. Stout uses Unsung Eagles to save an exciting collection of those accounts from oblivion. These are not rehashed tales from the hoary icons of the war. Rather, they are stories from the masses of largely unrecognized men who - in the aggregate - actually won it.

In 1929, a 22-year-old maverick named Frank Whittle - a self-taught aeronautical obsessive and risk-takingly brilliant RAF pilot - presented a blueprint for a revolutionary, jet-powered aircraft engine to the Air Ministry. His idea had the potential to change the course of history, but it was summarily rejected. In this meticulously researched biography, Duncan Campbell-Smith charts Whittle's stoic efforts to build his jet engine in the interwar years.

Beyond the Horizon: The Declassified History of the CIA’s Office of Special Activities (CIA Area 51 Chronicles – Book 10) By TD Barnes The CIA’s most secretive division. The covert missions that shaped modern intelligence. The untold story of Area 51’s black operations. For decades, the CIA’s Office of Special Activities (OSA) operated in the shadows, overseeing some of the most classified projects in intelligence history. From the secret testing of high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft to the development of stealth technology and satellite surveillance, this elite division played...

The tiny ex-mercenary company Alto Group struggled to get recognition for their six engine heavy transport aircraft (built to an "acquired" design) at their Northern Michigan factory by delivering F4F Wildcat fighters and two M-3 Stuart tanks to Wake Island after December 7th. Answering a call from a man they only met once, they mount a new mission to give logistical support to battered remnants of USAAF Far Eastern forces that have retreated to Australia and New Guinea.Using close air support tricks they learned fighting in South America in the Gran Chao War, they support the troops ...

The most tragic accident in aviation history is more than a story of the loss of 583 lives. As gripping as the event is here in its telling, learning why the accident happened, much of it from the mouths of some of the crew who perished, is itself a story worth experiencing. The disaster did have an upside, for it has directly led to today's enviable commercial aviation safety record.

In The Crash Detectives, veteran aviation journalist and air safety investigator Christine Negroni takes us inside crash investigations from the early days of the jet age to the present, including the search for answers about what happened to the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. As Negroni dissects what happened and why, she explores their common themes and, most important, what has been learned from them to make planes safer.

Tired after eleven years of serving as flying 'Soldiers of Fortune' in South American wars and as 'Internationalistas' in the service of Republican Spain, Ricart, Wing, and Wilson have moved to the forests of Northern Michigan after fighting to the bitter end in Spain.Gathering Spanish refugees and Upper Peninsula locals, they start to form a manufacturing firm, building primary gliders and glider launching winches. The lure of big money temps Eddie Ricart to build the largest transport aircraft in the world from "acquired" plans and force the US military establishment to employ it by ...

Sam Kleiner’s The Flying Tigers uncovers the hidden story of the group of young American men and women who crossed the Pacific before Pearl Harbor to risk their lives defending China. Led by legendary army pilot Claire Chennault, these men left behind an America still at peace in the summer of 1941 using false identities to travel across the Pacific to a run-down airbase in the jungles of Burma.

In Ted W. Lawson’s classic Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Lawson gives a vivid eyewitness account of the unorthodox assignment that 85 intrepid volunteer airmen - the “Tokyo Raiders” - under the command of celebrated flier James H. Doolittle executed in April 1942. The plan called for 16 B-25 twin-engine medium bombers of the Army Air Corps to take off from the aircraft carrier Hornet, bomb industrial targets in Japan, and land at airfields in China.

To see a video on this book, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxexnqdlUv8. This is the second and final part of a novel of the Union Balloon Corps in the Civil War, the world's first Air Force. At the start of the Civil War, Nathaniel Curry is a fifteen-year-old telegraph operator in Richmond. He travels to Washington to see a balloon demonstration and finds himself, entirely by accident, assisting Thaddeus Lowe in directing artillery fire on a Confederate emplacement – the first use of an aircraft in warfare. A pariah back in Virginia, Nathaniel joins the nascent Union Balloon Corps,...

In 1993, U.S. women earned the right to fly in combat, but the full story of how it happened is largely unknown. The Fly Girls Revolt chronicles the actions of a band of women who overcame decades of discrimination and prevailed against bureaucrats, chauvinists, anti-feminists, and even other military women. Drawing on extensive research, interviews with women who served in the 1970s and 1980s, and her personal experiences in the Air Force, Eileen Bjorkman weaves together a tale of the women who fought for the right to enter combat and be treated as equal partners in the U.S. military.

This is a true story about a man who was passionate about airplanes—flying them, designing them and building them. His innovative designs and creative vision were so much a part of aviation history that his breakthrough biplane design, the Staggerwing, shown on the cover of this book, hangs in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. Ted Wells not only designed the Staggerwing, but also the Bonanza and many other extremely popular and enduring commercial and military aircraft. Beech Aircraft, the company he co-founded with Walter and Olive Ann Beech...