Aviation History

The role of not only the test pilots but the engineers, aerodynamicists, and support staff in making supersonic flight possible has been widely overlooked. Beyond Blue Skies charts the triumphs and tragedies of the rocket-plane era and the unsung efforts of the men and women who made amazing achievements possible.

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.

In Balloon Ace: The Life of an Early Airpower Visionary, historian Charles Dusch reconstructs Louis Bennett Jr.'s lost legacy. Advocating for a national aviation reserve years before the writings of "Billy" Mitchell, Bennett created a state aerial militia in 1917, complete with supporting airbases and an airplane factory. When the US Army refused to accept his unit, a frustrated Bennett joined the Royal Air Force to fight on the Western Front, destroying nine German balloons and three aircraft in a matter of days before he himself was shot down.

The gripping, definitive history of the Hindenburg disaster, the rise of the Nazis, and the road to World War II as never before told. On the evening of May 6, 1937, the majestic German Zeppelin Hindenburg arrived before cheering crowds in Lakehurst, New Jersey, when suddenly, a titanic inferno...

A riveting reimagining of the young woman who almost ended the American Revolution. Philadelphia in the 1770s. Peggy Shippen longs for the war she’s living through to end. Though not always appreciated at home, she finds her curiosity is welcomed by a lively and influential circle of friends...

Bestselling author of The Arsenal of Democracy and The Accidental President, A. J. Baime returns with the incredible story of the airplane that ended World War II, the B-29 Superfortress, the rise of American airpower, and the man who made it all possible. Of all the feats of American ingenuity...

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.

Paul Tremelling was just seven years old when he watched the Royal Navy's Sea Harriers leave their home base in Somerset to do battle against the Argentine Air Force in the Falklands War. Two decades later, he would join this exclusive club, one of an elite band of Fleet Air Arm fighter pilots, charged with standing in the way of Her Majesty's enemies. This is the story of what it takes to make it in the dog-eat-dog arena of fighter combat. In the cockpit or crew room, the pressure is relentless, the humour merciless. It's no place for the faint-hearted.

In Ted W. Lawson’s classic Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Lawson gives a vivid eyewitness account of the unorthodox assignment that 85 intrepid volunteer airmen - the “Tokyo Raiders” - under the command of celebrated flier James H. Doolittle executed in April 1942. The plan called for 16 B-25 twin-engine medium bombers of the Army Air Corps to take off from the aircraft carrier Hornet, bomb industrial targets in Japan, and land at airfields in China.

From an elite Navy rescue swimmer comes this insider perspective on what it takes to survive some of the most dangerous situations imaginable—and how the lessons learned can help overcome other momentous challenges.

The extraordinary true story of Lockheed Martin’s “Skunk Works”—the radical innovation hub that designed the greatest airplanes of the twentieth century—and the visionary who made it all possible "A kerosene-soaked masterclass in what extreme innovation looks, feels, and even smells...

The Parachute Regiment is Britain's elite airborne infantry. On the 80th anniversary of their first crucial campaign, in Operation Torch in North Africa, historian and broadcaster Mark Urban combines perspectives from German and British sources to tell the gripping stories of the men who had the resilience, fitness and self-reliance to be "Red Devils"—the name they were given by their German enemies.

James Tobin, award-winning author of Ernie Pyle's War and The Man He Became, has penned the definitive account of the inspiring and impassioned race between the Wright brothers and their primary rival Samuel Langley across ten years and two continents to conquer the air. For years, Wilbur Wright...

Today, mobile connections are so readily accessible that it is perhaps easy to forget the time when only the elite had access to a phone provided by the sole operator: the Government of India. It all changed in the early 1990s as liberalisation stirred the Indian economy out of its decades of...

The untold story of five women who fought to compete against men in the high-stakes national air races of the 1920s and 1930s - and won.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis never wrote a memoir, but she told her life story and revealed herself in intimate ways through the nearly 100 books she brought into print during the last two decades of her life as an editor at Viking and Doubleday. Based on archives and interviews with Jackie's...

Nearly everything people know about airships is wrong. Few realize that prior to the Hindenburg disaster airships transported passengers without a single casualty for more than twenty years, a record unmatched by any other form of transportation. When Giants Ruled the Sky tells the true but little-known story of the USS Macon (ZRS-5), the world's largest, most expensive, and most technologically advanced airship of her day, and the four men responsible for conceiving, designing, building, and flying her.

On the night of July 4, 1943, transport aircraft Liberator AL523 took off from Gibraltar's North Front tarmac and within moments crashed into the sea with only one survivor, the pilot. The commander-in-chief of the Polish army and prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, was dead. Rumors as to the cause of the crash abounded. Was it pilot error? Was it, as officially classified, merely an accident, or was it, as the authors conclude in this riveting and meticulous study, an act of sabotage?

What was it like to soar through the night sky fighting enemy aircraft in the Second World War? After completing intensive training Roderick Chisholm was thrust into the height of the Blitz to protect his country in the black of night. Guided by rudimentary radar he, along with his fellow pilots of 604 Squadron, developed the art of night-fighter operations.

From Martin Dugard, #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Bill O'Reilly's Killing series, comes a nonfiction thriller about the race between the Allies and Soviets to conquer the heart of Nazi Germany. “Gripping, popular history at its page-turning best.”—Alex Kershaw “With the...