Aviation History

From an elite Navy rescue swimmer comes this insider perspective on what it takes to survive some of the most dangerous situations imaginable—and how the lessons learned can help overcome other momentous challenges.

From the author of bestselling Sisters in Captivity, seven remarkable stories of men who served from WWI to Korea–their wartime exploits and achievements through aviation.

Catkiller 3-2 provides unique insights into the role of the tactical air controller, airborne (TACA) in I Corps as seen through the eyes of one of the pilots who flew low-flying, unarmed, single-engine aircraft in support of marine ground units during the Vietnam War. When Gen. William Westmoreland changed the marines' role in I Corps into a combat one, the Marines found themselves in need of more fixed wing aircraft to handle the TACA missions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This book encourages and inspires young women to explore new opportunities in air and space. Packed with inspiring words, stories, and photographs from International trailblazing women in the worldwide air and space industry.

This one-volume anthology provides a comprehensive analysis of the role that air power has played in military conflicts over the past century. Comprising 16 essays penned by a global cadre of leading military experts, A History of Air Warfare chronologically examines the utility of air power from World War I to the second Lebanon war, campaign by campaign.

“The Air Force’s Black Pilot Training Experience” highlights the unique experiences of black pilots in Air Force pilot training. The purpose of the book is to give the reader insight into these experiences, propose changes to the Air Force’s conduct of Specialized Undergraduate Pilot Training (SUPT) and to show how the Air Force’s inability to produce more black pilots directly contributes to the lack of diversity in its senior-most leadership levels. This book is a sequel to “The Air Force’s Black Ceiling” and builds on its insights. As a sequel, the book exhorts the Air ...

Contemporary Adult Nonfiction history of women in aviation with International appeal for readers interested in women pilots and female astronaut history. Packed with easy-to-read, true stories of historic International women aviators and female astronauts of the world. Historic female pilots and women astronauts from America, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Norway, and Russia. Illustrated with over 110 unique photographs of International women aviators and female space history makers in a pictorial format. Filled with powerful and ...

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...

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,...

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.

August, 1944... World War Two rages across Europe and the South Pacific, far from the quiet, small-town world of Winslow, Arizona, where seventeen-year-old, aviation-crazy Jimmy “Flyboy” Doyle complains that “nothing ever happens around here, damn it.” Until...one night at the Winslow airport... Nazi Abwehr agents kidnap rocket pioneer Professor Robert Goddard and—by sheer accident—Flyboy too, and whisk them down to South America, where Adolf Hitler’s ultra-top-secret Amerika Projekt is in full swing off the coastline of French Guiana on the notorious penal colony, “...

On August 20, 1942, twelve Marine dive-bombers and nineteen Marine fighters landed at Guadalcanal. Their mission: defeat the Japanese navy and prevent it from sending more men and supplies to "Starvation Island," as Guadalcanal was nicknamed. The Japanese were turning the remote, jungle-covered mountain in the south Solomon Islands into an air base from which they could attack the supply lines between the U.S. and Australia.

Devotion tells the inspirational story of the U.S. Navy’s most famous aviation duo, Lieutenant Tom Hudner and Ensign Jesse Brown, and the Marines they fought to defend. A white New Englander from the country-club scene, Tom passed up Harvard to fly fighters for his country. An African American sharecropper’s son from Mississippi, Jesse became the navy’s first Black carrier pilot, defending a nation that wouldn’t even serve him in a bar.

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 ...

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 ...

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.