The majority of it consists of letters between Wilbur Wright and his mentor Octave Chanute, in which Wright describes their technical progress, then their years of legal battles to protect their exclusive patent rights to the airplane. Two volumes, 2,000 total pages from cover-to-cover, and yet it’s still a good read. Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, Marvin W.Practical Knowledge: Short takeoffs, ditching, first aid, basics of amputation using only scrounged items. Badly injured crashing off the coast of China, Lawson and his crew band with Chinese rebels to elude Japanese occupiers. Lawson commanded one of the 16 B-25s of Doolittle’s Raiders that take off from the deck of the carrier Hornet and bomb the Japanese mainland. My favorite stories have heroes overcoming overwhelming odds and surviving. Practical Knowledge: Emergency aircraft evacuation, basic airfield construction, elements of radio communication, short takeoffs and landings. On the flight back to base hundreds of crewmen bail out over Serbia, where peasants round the men up, then help them build an airstrip on a remote peak, where they escape in C-47s. To cut off Hitler’s petroleum supplies, in 1943 America launches bomber strikes on Romanian oil fields, which are ringed by withering artillery. Practical Knowledge: Basic tunnel engineering using only contents found inside a prison barracks. In 1942 three British pilots held prisoner by Germany build a wooden vaulting horse and, while their fellow prisoners work out in the prison compound, they hide inside the horse and dig a tunnel under the camp fence (and German noses) and make their escape. Practical Knowledge: Sometimes it’s just good to read a few paragraphs of genius from time-to-time. I’m a huge Pyle fan had Pyle lived to blog, he’d be the best blogger in the history of blogging. Practical Knowledge: 33.3 hours’ worth of fuel conservation tips.īefore he was the best war correspondent in the history of war correspondenting, Pyle wrote an aviation column for the Washington Daily News in which he honed his famous style by writing about fliers and flying. This 1954 Pulitzer prizewinner is probably the best-known first-person account of a solo cross-country flight, if you’re willing to accept the Atlantic Ocean as a country. And what’s more important, they’re all in easy-to-understand English. Anyway, here is a brief list of my favorite aviation books, making special note of the practical hands-on airplane knowledge they impart. Thoreau built a house for a little over $20, and Cayley bankrolled a flying machine. Could today’s scientist so poetically describe orbital mechanics as it applies to the retired space shuttle? Hell, I’ve interviewed a bunch of astronauts and other than talking about having to eat crappy food on the space station I can’t understand what they’re saying.Ĭayley’s musings reminds me of Henry David Thoreau’s The Dispersion of Seeds, though Cayley lacks Thoreau’s Transcendentalist bent and his gentle insight into the nature of nature-but then the two do have different purposes. Thus from a single seed sprouted the airplane. But it is so formed and balanced that it no sooner is blown from the tree that it instantly creates a rotative force preserving the seed for the centre, and the centrifugal force of the wing keeps it nearly horizontal, meeting the air in a very small angle like the bird’s wing, and by this means the seed is supported till a moderate wind will carry it in a path not falling more than one in 6 from an horizontal one, so that from a moderately high tree it may fly 60 yards before it reaches the earth.” It is an oval seed furnished with one thin wing, which one would first imagine would not impede its fall but only guide the seed downward, like the feathers upon an arrow. “I was much struck with the beautiful contrivance of the chat of the sycamore seed. Take, for instance, this excerpt from the obscure Aeronautical and Miscellaneous Note-book by Sir George Cayley, the now-little-known English gentleman-farmer scientist who discovered the principles of flight through acute observations of nature: Instead, we rely upon the power of historians to describe the works to us, and something invariably gets lost in translation. And it’s not only because they’re written in three or four different tongues. Yet in recent times, few have personally gazed upon these ancient-often wildly inaccurate-texts, pamphlets and articles, except the aforementioned senile aviation history geeks or people who are writing aviation-history books. What’s on your list of favorite aviation books?
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