Aviation History

In 100 Years of Air Power and Aviation, Robin Higham, regarded by many as the dean of aviation historians, presents a critical history of British, American, Soviet, German, Italian, French, Japanese, and Israeli aviation. He moves easily from theory to concrete example and back again, in the process discussing the social, economic, and political components of air power, the major wars and police actions in which aircraft have been employed, the composition of air forces, and the creation of aviation industries.

On the morning of October 24, 1944, in the Sibuyan Sea amidst the Philippine Islands, VT-18, a close-knit squadron of six young American torpedo bomber pilots, departed the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid on a search and destroy mission. Their target: the super-battleship Musashi, the pride of the Imperial Japanese Navy. The pilots were tasked with preventing the immense enemy warship and the huge naval armada of which she was a part from inflicting unspeakable damage.

During the height of the roaring '20s, Jessie Miller longs for adventure. Fleeing a passionless marriage in the backwaters of Australia, 23-year-old Jessie arrives in London and promptly falls in with the Bright Young Things, those gin-soaked boho-chic intellectuals draped in suits, flapper dresses, and pearls. At a party Jessie meets Captain William Lancaster, married himself and fresh from the Royal Air Force, with a scheme in his head to become as famous as Charles Lindbergh, who has just crossed the Atlantic. Lancaster will do Lindy one better: fly from London to Melbourne, and in Jessie Miller he’s found the perfect co-pilot.

Without a Trace: 1881-2016 explores the most interesting of these disappearances: mysteries that have baffled investigators for years. Occasionally tragic and frequently amusing, Without a Trace: 1881-2016 is unerringly accurate and informative. Sylvia Wrigley introduces the crews, innocent bystanders, and rescuers in this collection of true stories. Documenting the popular theories from each case, she uses her knowledge and experience as a pilot and an aviation journalist to demystify aviation jargon and narrow down each disappearance to the most likely explanations.

A retired naval aviator (fighter pilot) and former paratrooper, Shanle puts listeners in the cockpit as hundreds of aircraft engage in the biggest and deadliest dog fights in history. Storm the beaches of Pacific Islands with the Marines, parachute into France with the Army Airborne, and stand on the decks of the USS Johnston as the tiny Destroyer charges an entire Imperial Japanese Fleet by itself.

September 11, 2001, did not represent the first aerial assault against the American mainland. The first came on July 17,1996, with the downing of TWA Flight 800. This book looks in detail at what people saw and heard on this fateful night. First Strike explains how a determined corps of ordinary citizens worked to reveal the compromise and corruption that tainted the federal investigation.

Dzisiejsza młodzież wariuje na punkcie długowłosych śpiewaków albo mistrzów piłki kopanej, ale w latach dwudziestych i trzydziestych XX wieku największym wzięciem cieszyli się lotnicy. A jeśli w dodatku byli tak przystojni, wytworni i inteligentni jak Charles Augustus Lindbergh.

Meet the girls who fly the friendly skies: Ali: "All men seem to think that if they've had sex with a girl once they can have her any time they want. They're wrong." Beri: "I know a librarian who makes me feel positively sheltered and stews who've spent years in the air without losing their virginity." Connie: "We see men at their worst, grabby and aggressive. I've never had sex with a man." Donna: "If you're looking to get married, there's no better way--though I don't know why men want to marry stewardesses." Elaine: "I hate to open my eyes in the morning. First I have to guess whether ...

On February 21, 1943, Pan American Airways' celebrated seaplane, the Yankee Clipper, took off from New York's Marine Air Terminal and island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving at Lisbon the following evening, it crashed in the Tagus River, killing twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers and crew. Americans in a World at War traces the backstories of seven worldly Americans aboard that plane, their personal histories, their politics, and the paths that led them toward war.

Between 1918 and 1955, 60 airmen were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) and Two Bars. In this book, recorded for the first time together are the mini-biographies of those 60 along with the citations that accompanied their awards, or in some cases the recommendations for them. As the listener will discover, the range of airmen who received the DFC and Two Bars cover most of the ambit of World War II operations, be they fighter pilots, bomber pilots, night-fighter aircrew, aircrew navigators, engineers, etc, or reconnaissance pilots

Listeners will learn over 100 facts about military sea and military air vehicles, such as helicopters, bombers, and stealth flighters, as well as submarines, mammoth ships, and militarized barges.

The first full reappraisal of one of Britain's great fighter aces, this book examines the truth behind Tuck's 1956 biography, Fly for Your Life. It looks at the evidence behind the myths, checks out some of the exaggerated stories and reveals the real Stanford Tuck. In January 1942 Bob Tuck was the top-scoring British fighter ace with an official score of twenty-nine enemy aircraft destroyed. During the Battle of Britain his legendary prowess grew and he was posted to command a leaderless and demoralized squadron, this time flying Hurricanes.

Anthony Fokker: The Flying Dutchman Who Shaped American Aviation tells the larger-than-life true story of maverick pilot and aircraft manufacturer Anthony Fokker. Fokker came from an affluent Dutch family. Despite not receiving a traditional education, he stumbled his way into aviation as a young stunt pilot in Germany in 1910. He survived a series of spectacular crashes and rose to fame. A combination of industrial espionage, luck, and deception then propelled him to become Germany's leading WWI aircraft manufacturer. When the German Revolution swept the country, Fokker made a spectacular escape to the US.

Concealed deep within China's inland borders is one of the most secret airplanes ever flown, known as Devil Dragon. She's sleek, unbelievably fast, and mysterious - her test pilots have one mission in mind: make her test flights successful for operational use as soon as possible. Or sooner. But when strange transmissions of pilots are recorded without an aircraft appearing on radar and bizarre cell phone signals are detected at towers hundreds of miles apart, Ford Stevens is asked to take on the most dangerous assignment of his life.

The 1914-18 conflict narrated through the voices of the men whose combat was in the air. The empty chairs belonged, all too briefly, to the doomed young First World War airmen who failed to return from the terrifying daily aerial combats above the trenches of the Western Front. The edict of their commander in chief was the missing aviators were to be immediately replaced. Before the new faces could arrive, the departed men's vacant seats at the dinner table were sometimes poignantly occupied by their caps and boots, placed there in a sad ritual by their surviving colleagues.

The airplane changed the course of history. Above all, it changed the history of the United States. When the Wright brothers invented their flying machine, Americans lived in a nation of two dimensions, circumscribed by lines drawn on a conventional map. A century later, their nation existed - in fact, reigned - in three dimensions. Two million Americans slipped the surly bonds of earth daily, carried aloft by aircraft operating in every part of the world.

Alone in a Spartan black cockpit, test pilot Mike Melvill rocketed toward space. He had 80 seconds to exceed the speed of sound and begin the climb to a target no civilian pilot had ever reached. He might not make it back alive. If he did he would make history as the world's first commercial astronaut. The spectacle defied reason, the result of a competition dreamed up by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, whose vision for a new race to space required small teams to do what only the world's largest governments had done before.

As command module pilot of Apollo 17, the last crewed flight to the moon, Ron Evans combined precision flying and painstaking geological observation with moments of delight and enthusiasm. As a patriotic American in charge of command module America, Evans was nicknamed “Captain America” by his fellow crew members.

The recent Hollywood film Hidden Figures presents a portrait of how African American women shaped the US effort in aerospace during the height of Jim Crow. In Storming the Heavens, Gerald Horne presents the necessary back story to this account and goes further to detail the earlier struggle of African Americans to gain the right to fly.

Fred C. Kelly, a former newspaperman, author, and an old friend of the Wrights, tells the story of the 2 brilliant, dedicated, flight-obsessed bicycle mechanics from Ohio who first realized mankind's age-old dream of conquering the skies. Long considered the definitive Wright Brothers biography (the manuscript was read and approved by Orville Wright), Kelly's work recounts the Wrights' early history and the complete behind-the-scenes story of how they designed, built, tested, and flew the first "Flyer."