Aviation History

Arctic explorer and American visionary Walter Wellman pioneered both polar and trans-Atlantic airship aviation, making history’s first attempts at each. Wellman has been cast as a self-promoting egomaniac known mostly for his catastrophic failures. Instead he was a courageous innovator who pushed the boundaries of polar exploration and paved the way for the ultimate conquest of the North Pole—which would be achieved not by dogsled or airplane, but by airship.

Gifted storyteller Winston Groom, the best-selling author of Forrest Gump, has written the fascinating story of three extraordinary heroes who defined aviation during the great age of flight: Charles Lindbergh, Eddie Rickenbacker, and Jimmy Doolittle. These cleverly interwoven tales of their heart-stopping adventures take us from the feats of World War I through the heroism of World War II and beyond, including daring military raids and survival at sea, and will appeal to fans of Unbroken, The Greatest Generation, and Flyboys.

Award-winning author William Kent Krueger has gained an immense fan base for his Cork O’Connor series. In Ordinary Grace, Krueger looks back to 1961 to tell the story of Frank Drum, a boy on the cusp of manhood. A typical 13-year-old with a strong, loving family, Frank is devastated when a tragedy forces him to face the unthinkable - and to take on a maturity beyond his years.

From the development of the U-2 to the Stealth fighter, the never-before-told story behind America's high-stakes quest to dominate the skies. Skunk Works is the true story of America's most secret and successful aerospace operation. As recounted by Ben Rich, the operation's brilliant boss for nearly two decades, the chronicle of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works is a drama of Cold War confrontations and Gulf War air combat, of extraordinary feats of engineering and human achievement against fantastic odds.

At the dawn of the 20th century, when human flight was still considered an impossibility, Germany’s Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin vied with the Wright Brothers to build the world’s first successful flying machine. As the Wrights labored to invent the airplane, Zeppelin fathered the remarkable airship, sparking a bitter rivalry between the two types of aircraft and their innovators that would last for decades, in the quest to control one of humanity’s most inspiring achievements. And it was the airship—not the airplane—that led the way.

747 is the thrilling story behind "the Queen of the Skies" - the Boeing 747 - as told by Joe Sutter, one of the most celebrated engineers of the 20th century, who spearheaded its design and construction. Sutter's vivid narrative takes us back to a time when American technology was cutting-edge and jet travel was still glamorous and new. With wit and warmth, he gives an insider's sense of the larger than life-size personalities - and the tensions - in the aeronautical world.

From the young airmen who took their frail machines high above the trenches of World War I and fought their foes in single combat, there emerged a renowned company of brilliant aces - among them Ball, Bishop, McCudden, Collishaw, and Mannock - whose legendary feats have echoed down half a century. But behind the elite pilots in the Royal Flying Corps, there were many hundreds of airmen who flew their hazardous daily sorties in outdated planes without ever achieving fame.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of New York Times best sellers including Talking to Strangers and host of the podcast Revisionist History, uses original interviews, archival footage, and his trademark insight to weave together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in Central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard. As listeners hear these stories unfurl, Gladwell examines one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.

The author was drawn into the United States Army through ROTC, and he went through training to fly helicopters in combat over Vietnam. His experiences are notable because he flew both Huey “Slicks” and Huey “Gunships”: the former on defense as he flew troops into battle, and the latter on offense as he took the battle to the enemy. Through this book, the author relives his experiences flying and fighting, with special attention given to his and other pilots’ day-to-day lives.

Ed Macy had always dreamed of a career in the army, so when the British Army Air Corps launched its attack helicopter program, Macy bent every rule in the book to make sure he was the first to sign up to fly the Apache—the deadliest, most technically advanced helicopter in the world and the toughest to fly. In 2007, Macy's Apache squadron was dispatched to Afghanistan's notorious Helmand Province with the mission to fight alongside and protect the men on the ground by any means necessary.

Stick and Rudder is the first exact analysis of the art of flying ever attempted. It has been continuously in print for 33 years. It shows precisely what the pilot does when he flies, just how he does it, and why. Because the basics are largely unchanging, the book therefore is applicable to large airplanes and small, old airplanes and new, and is of interest not only to the learner but also to the accomplished pilot and to the instructor himself.

Of the many myths that emerged following the end of the Korean War, the prevailing one in the West was that of the absolute supremacy of US Air Force pilots and aircraft over their Soviet-supplied opponents. The claims of the 10:1 victory-loss ratio achieved by the US Air Force fighter pilots flying the North American F-86 Sabre against their communist adversaries, amongst other such fabrications, went unchallenged until the end of the Cold War, when Soviet records of the conflict were finally opened. From that point onwards, a very different story began to emerge.

In late May 1927 an inexperienced and unassuming 25-year-old Air Mail pilot from rural Minnesota stunned the world by making the first non-stop transatlantic flight. A spectacular feat of individual daring and collective technological accomplishment, Charles Lindbergh's flight from New York to Paris ushered in America's age of commercial aviation.

This is the story of a naive kid who thought people did the right thing and the good guys always won. The Learjet Diaries is a fictional pilot memoir of young ambitious pilot who starts his career as a Learjet charter pilot flying around the Caribbean and South America in the early 1980s. It is a well-written and compelling aviation adventure with each paragraph sizzling with tension and authenticity. The author places you right in the cockpit as he learns the strengths and sensitivities of one of the world’s most demanding business jets. As a reader you feel the control stick in your ...

Project OXCART: The Untold Story of Area 51 (CIA Area 51 Chronicles – Book 6) By TD Barnes The fastest spy plane ever built. The birth of stealth. The CIA’s most secretive aviation project. In the depths of the Cold War, the CIA faced a critical challenge—the revolutionary U-2 spy plane had become vulnerable to Soviet air defenses. In response, the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology launched Project OXCART, an ambitious effort to develop a reconnaissance aircraft that could fly higher, faster, and with stealth capabilities never seen before. The result was the A-12 ...

Can we “train-out” the next aircraft accident while trying to understand the fascination of flight? Why do we yearn to fly? Because the emotions generated by flight, from fascination to fright, from inspiration to isolation are human emotions - we fly because it helps us feel what it is like to be human and to be the unique human that we are. I am an experienced “gold seal” flight instructor and author and I wrote this book both as a way to pass on safety information to current pilots, but also to inspire pilots – never forgetting why we want to fly in the first place. This book ...

How far will an American sniper go to save the lives of his fellow soldiers? Is there a line he will not cross? CIA officer Rene Granier heads up a covert team of specialists out to hunt down and annihilate the very heart of the Viet Cong. Will their merciless tactics shorten the war? Will it be worth the price? In 1966, the Vietnam War rages with no end in sight. The Americans try everything in their power to stop the flow of arms to the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces in the south, but nothing works. The generals at the Pentagon underestimated their enemy and the army of dedicated ...

CIA Wizards of Aerial Reconnaissance: The CIA's Trailblazing Tech Evolution (CIA Area 51 Chronicles – Book 7) By TD Barnes The CIA’s secret aviation pioneers. The evolution of intelligence technology. The hidden history of aerial reconnaissance. For decades, the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology pushed the boundaries of what was possible in intelligence gathering, transforming aerial reconnaissance and surveillance technology. From the covert flights of Air America to the groundbreaking U-2 and A-12 Archangel programs at Area 51, the CIA pioneered a new era of intelligence ...

Beryl Markham, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, describes her childhood on a farm in Kenya, her apprenticeship as a horse trainer, and her later career as a pioneer aviator who piloted passengers and supplies in a small plane to remote corners of Africa.

Sabre Wrath follows a pilot and his F-86 Sabre in the first jet v jet dogfights in the dawn of the jet era over an area which became known as Mig Alley. The Korean War was not only a landmark conflict under the guidance of the United Nations, but it was also the first serious testing ground for jet-to-jet combat. The North Korean military capacity had barely progressed past ox carts and prop planes, forcing the Communist Chinese Air Force (CCAF) to augment much of their air defense. This led to Soviet equipment, training, and personal participating in the air war, and fast-evolving jet ...