Since the Wright brothers made their famed flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903, aviation has emerged as the indispensable arm of American military power. In this detailed and informative history, Charles J. Gross traces its development from the technological antecedents of the Wright brothers' triumph through the air war for Kosovo. Drawing on examples from all periods and all service branches, he explains the roles of politics, economics, and technology in shaping air power in the U.S. armed forces and assesses the actual impact of military aviation on warfare.
Gross discusses major...

In Aviation and Air Power in the Twentieth Century 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 from the Wright brothers and the early pusher aircraft of World...

The airplane ranks as one of history's most ingenious and phenomenal inventions--and surely one of the most world-shaking. How ideas about its aerodynamics first came together and how the science and technology evolved to forge the airplane into the revolutionary machine it became is the epic story James R. Hansen tells in "The Bird Is on the Wing." Just as the airplane is a defining technology of the twentieth century, aerodynamics has been the defining element of the airplane.
Hansen provides an engaging, easily understandable introduction to the role of aerodynamics in the design of...

General aviation encompasses all the ways aircraft are used beyond commercial and military flying: private flights, barnstormers, cropdusters, and so on. Authors Janet and Michael Bednarek have taken on the formidable task of discussing the hundred-year history of this broad and diverse field by focusing on the most important figures and organizations in general aviation and the major producers of general aviation aircraft and engines.
This history examines the many airplanes used in general aviation, from early Wright and Curtiss aircraft to the Piper Cub and the Lear Jet. The authors...

The history of the air age has mostly been written from the perspective of aircraft designers, builders, and pilots.
"Imagining Flight "is a history of the air age as the rest of us have experienced it: on the pages of books, the screens of movie theaters, and the front pages of newspaper--and in airline cabins during peacetime and bomb shelters during wartime. It is a book about the ways in which people outside the aviation business have looked at, dreamed about, and worried over powered flight in the century since the Wright brothers first showed a startled world that it was possible....

"Electronics in the Evolution of Flight "traces the paired history of modern aviation and electronics through their births in the minds of early thinkers and dreamers, such as the Wright Brothers and Alexander Graham Bell, to their eventual "marriage" under the name "avionics." Author Albert Helfrick provides a thorough account of the roles played by the famous and the obscure, from Edwin Howard Armstrong to Nikola Tesla and David Sarnoff, in the successful creation of aviation technology.
Helfrick does not limit his discussion to the flying machines themselves, but instead focuses much...

"The First Space Race" reveals the inside story of an epic adventure with world-altering stakes. From 1955 to 1958, American and Soviet engineers battled to capture the world's imagination by successfully launching the world's first satellite. The race to orbit featured two American teams led by rival services--the Army and the Navy--and a Soviet effort so secret that few even knew it existed. This race ushered in the Space Age with a saga of science, politics, technology, engineering, and human dreams.
Before 1955, the concept of an artificial satellite had been demonstrated only on...

"The First Space Race" reveals the inside story of an epic adventure with world-altering stakes. From 1955 to 1958, American and Soviet engineers battled to capture the world's imagination by successfully launching the world's first satellite. The race to orbit featured two American teams led by rival services--the Army and the Navy--and a Soviet effort so secret that few even knew it existed. This race ushered in the Space Age with a saga of science, politics, technology, engineering, and human dreams.
Before 1955, the concept of an artificial satellite had been demonstrated only on...

In this book, author Rosalie Schwartz uses the 1933 RKORadio Pictures production Flying Down to Rio to examine the interplay of technology and popular culture that shaped a distinctive twentiethcentury sensibility. The musical comedy connected airplanes, movies, and tourism, ending spectacularly with chorus girls dancing on the wings of airplanes high above Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The Hollywood fantasy capped three decades during which airplanes and movies engendered new expectations and redefined peoples sense of wellbeing, their personal satisfactions, and their interpersonal...

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.
The airplane turned the sky into a new domain of human activity, a fast-developing frontier. The first to brave that frontier were...