Archive for Items Categorized 'Aviation', only excerpts shown, click title for full entry.
From the Royal Flying Corps to the Race to Circumnavigate the Globe
The Adventures of Squadron Leader Archibald Stuart-MacLaren
by Vanessa Ascough
This biography is about a lot more than airmanship and record attempts and exotic places. Logistics challenges, rudimentary equipment, politics, health problems … will it end well for MacLaren?
Spreading My Wings
One of Britain’s Top Women Pilots Tells Her Remarkable Story from Pre-War Flying to Breaking the Sound Barrier
by Diana Barnato Walker
The subtitle tells you all you need to know. She flew 80 different types and delivered more than 260 Spitfires to the front. Her father was Bentley Boy Woolf Barnato, her partner in life Whitney Straight. A very worthy read.
Queen of the Midnight Skies
The Story of America’s Air Force Night Fighters
by Garry R. Pape & Ronald C. Harrison
While focusing on the Northrop P-61 the book also discusses other types, in the context of technology, operational matters, and personnel.
Life on a Wing and a Prayer
by Peter G. Dickens
A true story of and by someone who has spent decades flying anything and everything with wings. This memoir is the result of people who knew and appreciated those stories leaning on the author to write them down.
P-61 Black Widow, Northrop Night Fighter in WWII
by David Doyle
Designed from the outset to incorporate then-new radar the P-61 became America’s first dedicated night fighter, capable of carrying heavy weapons to give it the bite of the deadly nocturnal predator spider it is named after.
Bloody Dangerous: Fifty Missions Over Germany
The Last First-Hand Account From World War II
by Flt Lt Colin Bell, DFC
Chew on that subtitle for a moment: the last first-hand? Sure, you’ve seen a pile of war biographies already … but this author is a centenarian. And he rappelled down the side of a building at 102. Bloody dangerous all over again.
SR-71 Blackbird: Stories, Tales, and Legends
by Richard H. Graham
The Blackbird may be old but stories about this “hottest plane in the cold war” don’t get old. Here people who were involved in many different areas of its building and operation relate stand-out situations.
Skyhookers
An Illustrated History of Hook-on Aircraft and Their Dirigible Motherships
by William Wolf
You’re looking up at an airship in flight, little aircraft buzzing around it. You blink; they’re gone! Before the U.S. Navy perfected that trick there was an already long history of exploring how to launch one aircraft from another, perchance to also capture it again.
Douglas DC-8
by Wolfgang Borgmann
Initially conceived as an aerial-refueling tanker for the USAF, Douglas lost that bid to Boeing but pivoted to reconfigure the project as a long-range civilian jetliner; it would outlast its Boeing competitor by a wide margin—one flew in the US as late as 2025.
Midnight Flyboys
by Bruce Henderson
Operation Carpetbagger was a covert op and remained classified for half a century but then received a Presidential Unit Citation and Congressional Gold Medals for the outsize contributions to the war effort.
British Private Aircraft
by Arthur W.J.G. Ord-Hume
This book and its sister volume may look unassuming but they are nothing of the sort. They are also so well written that anyone with an ear for language will find them enriching.
L-15 Scout, Boeing’s Smallest Airplane
by Mal Holcomb
The “L” stands for Liaison and in theory this was a sensible aircraft. It was developed for a military contract that never materialized, and no civilian market ever emerged either. Only one is still flying, but you’d have to go to Alaska to see it.
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