Flight: A History of Aviation in Photographs - Softcover

Heppenheimer, T.

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9781552979846: Flight: A History of Aviation in Photographs

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1552979849 ISBN 13: 9781552979846

Publisher: Firefly Books, 2004

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An extraordinary visual history.

Fortunately the Wright brothers' first flight was captured forever by photography. A spectacular visual record accompanies every step of aviation's astonishing advances, and memorable images record travel events, such as the Hindenburg disaster.

Flight is a comprehensive history of air travel as told through four hundred dramatic photographs. The book covers aviation history from the first attempts at flight to the latest aircraft.

Flight includes the early pioneers of gliders and even a steampowered model plane that predated the Wrights' success at piloting a sustained powered flight.

The book covers the major eras of aviation:

Major aircraft of World War I
Barnstorming and adventure in the 1920s and 30s
Pre-World War II American aircraft and European dirigibles
Beginnings of passenger travel
Jet power and stealth during World War II and the Cold War
Modern military and passenger aircraft.

A short essay introduces each section and detailed captions explain the significance and context of each photograph. Flight also includes blueprints for a glimpse into the engineering marvels of seven aircraft ranging from a Spitfire fighter to the supersonic Concorde airliner.

Flight will appeal to aviation enthusiasts of all ages.

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About the Author:

T.A. Heppenheimer is one of the world's foremost aviation writers. He is the author of Turbulent Skies, a history of commercial aviation, which was made into the PBS television series Chasing the Sun. He also wrote NASA's authorized two-volume history of the space shuttle, Space Shuttle Decision and Development of the Space Shuttle.

Introduction

In recent years I have written several books on aviation and space flight, and I hold a particular interest in a flight as a personal experience. I bring to mind Lindbergh struggling to stay awake during a long night over the Atlantic, with morning and Ireland both far away. World War II bomber pilots waking in pitch-darkness at the flick of a light switch, stumbling through chill and fog to a briefing room, then donning heavy flight gear that left them overly warm and sweating while still on the ground. Test pilots at 17-mile altitudes, where the sky turned velvet purple and a single turn of the head could sweep across a view from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

So I was very pleased to take on the assignment of researching, writing and compiling Flight. I succeeded in obtaining numerous classic aviation photos ranging from a wartime view of bombers over Germany, escorted by fighters that traced curving contrails at higher altitudes to a color image showing a rocket-powered fighter plane in a near-vertical climb.

Good aviation photography constitutes an artform, and some of the best artists worked for Life magazine during the mid-twentieth century. Amongst the well-known ones are Margaret Bourke-White and Alfred Eisenstaedt. Life man, Loomis Dean, served in the Pacific. His photos include an earnest ground-handler arming his bombs, and a line of bombers with engines roaring just before take-off. Photographer Ralph Morse sailed aboard the carrier USS Hornet in 1942 and watched Doolittle's planes take off for their raid on Tokyo.

Edward Steichen, another artist, was a pioneer of color photography early in the last century with such images as the famous "Flatiron Building". In time he became curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. During the war he directed a Navy photo group that served in the Pacific.

During the mid-1950s, the composer Richard Rodgers sought to extend the promise of television as a medium, as he wrote the score for a major series, Victory at Sea. I had the pleasure of selecting photos that might have illustrated some of his works. On composition, "The Pacific Boils Over," recalls the Pearl Harbor attack. A photograph by Dean, showing a man using a big airplane tire as a hammock, fitted Rodgers' "Hard Work and Horseplay". Another image depicting aircraft carriers in line, escorted by battleships, might have illustrated his "Theme of the Fast Carriers."

As technical achievements, aviation and aerospace reflect the advances of electronics. It has been commonplace for computers to show millionfold improvements in performance, and aerospace has done this as well. The aircraft of World War I often flew with engines of a hundred horsepower. Half a century later, when Saturn V rockets carried astronauts to the moon, they lifted off with over a hundred million horsepower.

Much the same has been true for airplanes. In 1843 the inventor William Henson designed his Aerial Steam Carriage, with an engine of thirty horsepower. He declared that it would fly to China "in twenty-four hours certain". Just such a flight took place nearly a century and a half later, as a Boeing 747 flew nonstop from London to Sydney in twenty hours. Its power totaled not thirty horsepower, but more like 200,000.

Significantly, the importance of these achievements is that they have made long-distance flight commonplace. The poet Tennyson, a contemporary of Henson, wrote of "pilots of the purple twilight, Dropping down with costly bales." The science writer Arthur C. Clarke comments that the true wonder of aviation is that today's aircraft to not drop down with costly bales, but with cheap ones.

What has aviation accomplished? It has lifted the curse of Distance from the human race. In 1857, for instance, Wilbur and Orville Wright's father set out on a journey from Indiana to Oregon. Advances in transport had recently made it possible for him to travel the entire distance by steam. He took a train to New York, embarked by steamer for Panama, crossed that isthmus on a newly-completed railroad, then continued onward aboard other ships that took him first to San Francisco and then on to his destination. However, while in Panama he contracted malaria and needed a long period of convalescence before he could begin his work. Others fared worse along that route. In 1863 the engineer Theodore Judah, seeking to build a transcontinental railroad, came down with yellow fever during his Panama passage and died soon after.

The transcontinental railroad, allied with steamships, allowed travelers to girdle the globe in the eighty days of Jules Verne. Yet Distance remained unconquered. Half a century after that railroad linked East and West, people in Europe watched as family members departed for America in steerage, knowing that they might never see them again.

By contrast, the daughter of a good friend recently married and moved overseas. Soon after her husband lost his job, leaving the young newlyweds financially unstable. Even so, when they wanted to fly to Atlanta for a family visit, they simply purchased their tickets and made the trip.

By gaining importance, even in the lives of people of modest means, aviation has won particular success. The most significant technologies do not stand merely as awe-evoking monuments to their inventors. Rather, their technical achievements fade into the background as they enter our lives. Aviation has done this, and in this photographic collection, I have tried to show how it happened.

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