Archive for Items Categorized 'Aviation', only excerpts shown, click title for full entry.

The Art of NASA: The Illustrations That Sold the Missions

by Piers Bizony

Picture a time when no one outside the professional community thought much about space—except that it mustn’t fall to the Russians. So, if we really need to go there, how would we do it? And how do we get the taxpaying public excited about the newest frontier? More than two hundred illustrations tell that story.

Virginia Bader, A Collage of Memories of the First Lady of Aviation Art

by Jill Amadio

A pioneering force in aviation art, not as an artist but a dealer / gallerist, especially of prints signed by the artists and where possible, the pilots. Later, she was the first organizer of symposia that connected artists and their public.

The Greatest Escape

by Martin Barratt

RAF Bomber Command’s slogan was “the bomber will always get through.” But not necessarily back. Almost 45% of their aircrews died in WWII. Almost 10,000 were captured, and many kept their stories to themselves. This is one of them.

Hunting the Wind

by Teresa Webber & Jamie Dodson

A brief but meaningful and certainly heartfelt synopsis of the early years of the airline, in peace and war. Several of the contributors actually worked the boats and all of them bleed Pan Am blue.

A Leap from the Clouds

by Jerry Kuntz

Gravity works. Every time. Nowadays, most skydiving accidents result from an error in judgement not equipment failure. Some would argue that the first error is jumping out of a perfectly good airplane . . .

Antonov’s Heavy Transports: From the An-22 to An-225

by Gordon and Komissarov

The war in Ukraine is in the news daily but people seem to have forgotten already that among its early casualties was the one existing example of the world’s heaviest aircraft, once called by the NY Times “Ukraine’s winged ambassador to the world.” Let this fine book show you what you missed if you never saw it.

The Trans-Atlantic Pioneers

by Bruce Hales-Dutton

2019 marked the centenary of the first nonstop transatlantic flight. You’d think the world would be awash in books about that—but it’s not! Good thing this is a fine book, albeit bland.

MiG-29 in PAF

by Marek Radomski

Not a model history but a collection of color plates to show modelers what the Fulcrum looked like in its 20-year tour of duty with the Polish Air Force.

Queen of the Skies: The Lockheed Constellation

by Claude G. Luisada

Even almost a decade after its publication, this book still matters—and it comes with a Lockheed Manual on CD that you’d rarely find even at auction.

Lockheed Constellation: A History

by Graham M. Simons

The dolphin-shaped fuselage looked like no other. The triple tail made it instantly recognizable. It remained useful decades after jet airliners pushed it out of mainline service. There should be piles of books about it—but there aren’t. This is a good one.

Balloons and Airships: A Tale of Lighter Than Air Aviation

by Anthony Burton

What huge advantage does an LTA craft have still today? Range. This old story has a future, and every now and then a new book comes along to bring us current.

Sunbeam Aero Engines

by Alec Brew

Within the arc from tinplate working to land speed record cars fall many interim steps, and this small book gives a thorough account of how Sunbeam got into the aero engine business and how that spilled over into record cars.