Five Books on Aviation
Head on up into the wild blue yonder with these stories
Aviation has enthralled me since I was a small child. One of my earliest memories involves seeing Concorde, the Anglo-French supersonic airliner, at an airshow with my family and watching red-tailed, silver-bodied Northwest Airlines jets take off and land at Minneapolis-St. Paul international airport; I also wore out our VHS copy of Top Gun to the point where it would no longer play. It’s a fascination that refused to abate with time, and living in the Washington, DC area I’m lucky to have easy access to the two greatest aerospace museums in the world: the National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall and its Udvar-Hazy Center out at Dulles airport.
More broadly, though aviation has changed our world profoundly over the past 121 years since Orville and Wilbur Wright’s first powered flight, from the rise of airpower to the ability to jet anywhere in the world in a matter of hours. If the world truly has shrunk over the past century, aviation has had more to do with it than any other technology.
Without further ado, here are five of my favorite books on aviation—along with a barrage of additional books, movies, and documentaries worth checking out:
Wings: A History of Aviation From Kites to the Space Age: Smithsonian curator emeritus Tom D. Crouch’s book—published for the first centennial of powered flight in 2003—remains probably the best and most accessible history of aviation out there. Though Crouch’s narrative tails off a bit once it reaches the jet age, it provides a sterling account of flight’s growth and maturity in the first half of the twentieth century. The book highlights the pivotal role of public policy in fostering aviation as both a technology and an industry, especially in the United States—where the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA, played a critical role. But as Crouch makes clear, America’s aerospace industry only truly became the world-beating colossus we know today in the military build-up that preceded American entry into World War II.
The Airplane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings: This brief but informative history of the ideas, intuitions, and concepts that made aviation possible comes from another former Smithsonian curator, Jay Spenser. Readers learn how engineers and scientists thought up and developed the various parts of conventional aircraft—wings, fuselage, tail, engines, and so on that we all now instantly recognize as telltale components of an airplane. For Spenser, the story of the airplane culminates in the remarkable safety record of modern international passenger aviation—an epochal achievement we’ve come to take far too much for granted today.
The Great Air Race: Tragedy, Glory, and the Dawn of American Aviation: Believe it or not, there was a time when America’s aviation industry lagged its European rivals on just about every score. But as author John Lancaster tells us, American aviation enthusiasts—particularly those in the military—concocted a transcontinental air race just one year after the end of World War I to help build public support for the fledgling industry. An ambitious proof-of-concept experiment for a proposed air mail service, the race pushed the limits of the day’s aviation technology as well as the skill and physical endurance of participating pilots. Lancaster’s brisk and gripping narrative illustrates just how rudimentary and indeed dangerous aviation was at the end of its second decade—just nineteen out of sixty-three aircraft completed the full round trip.
Masters of the Air: Historian Donald Miller provides a vivid and fair-minded account of the U.S. strategic air campaign against Nazi Germany during World War II, one that served as the basis for the excellent streaming series of the same title on Apple TV+. American airmen flew B-17 and B-24 bombers on missions over the heart of the Third Reich in brutal conditions: sub-zero temperatures and the constant threat of German fighters and flak, suffering grievous losses until the introduction of the long-range P-51 Mustang escort fighter. Miller effortlessly and expertly weaves the big-picture deliberations of generals and the wider effect of bombing on the war in Europe together with the smaller stories of American bomber crews, prisoners-of-war held in German camps, and German civilians who faced the Allied onslaught.
Flying Camelot: The F-15, F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia: Michael W. Hankins, currently a curator at the Air and Space Museum, details the bureaucratic battles that produced the U.S. Air Force’s late Cold War and post-Cold War workhorse fighter jets, the F-15 Eagle and F-16 Fighting Falcon. He busts myths about the influence of defense gurus known as the “Fighter Mafia” who advocated for simpler and less advanced aircraft, saying they were “trapped by nostalgia” for a heavily romanticized view of World War I and World War II-era dogfighting. Despite the heavy influence of fighter pilot culture on the Air Force itself, the service refused to embrace the romantic “knights of the air” mythos promulgated by the Fighter Mafia.
These five books encompass the basics of military and commercial aviation, from the very beginnings of powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina to the most modern high-performance military jets. But there’s so much more ground to cover when it comes to aviation, and this selection of further books to read and documentaries to watch only scratches the surface of what’s out there.
If World War I aviation is your interest, then the excellent The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War by the late Samuel Hynes will be up your alley. For a dyspeptic British perspective, see James Hamilton-Paterson’s Marked for Death: The First War in the Air.
For tales of American aviation in the 1920s, check out David K. Randall’s account of the first aerial circumnavigation of the globe, Into Unknown Skies, as well as Barry Rosenberg’s and Catherine Macaulay’s Mavericks of the Sky on the first U.S. Air Mail pilots. And if you’re wondering how or why airplanes managed to beat out rigid airships to dominate the skies, S.C. Gwynne’s tale of the ill-fated British airship R101 His Majesty’s Airship provides a definitive answer.
When it comes to modern military aviation, there are a number of worthwhile and readable memoirs from American and British fighter pilots available. Dan Hampton’s bracing account of his time as a U.S. Air Force F-16 pilot, Viper Pilot: A Memoir of Air Combat, recounts the ins and outs of his service in two wars over Iraq. Royal Air Force pilot Mike Sutton’s Typhoon: The Inside Story of an RAF Squadron at War tells the story of the recent war against ISIS from the perspective of a Eurofighter Typhoon squadron commander, while British aviation author Rowland White’s Harrier 809 reveals the hazards and dangers Royal Navy pilots faced fighting over the South Atlantic during the Falklands War.
Commercial aviation gets its due as well: chief British Airways Concorde pilot Mike Bannister details what it was like to fly the supersonic transport as well as the tragic circumstances of its retirement in his aptly titled Concorde. Author Sam Howe Verhovek sketches out the battle between the British and American aircraft builders to dominate post-war commercial air travel in his slim and readable Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World.
Still, it can be hard to get a sense of a particular airplane without visual references—preferably video. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of documentaries on aviation either. My favorite has to be the 1980s British miniseries Reaching for the Skies, which I also watched over and over again as a kid. PBS has its own set of documentaries on aviation, among them the 2018 NOVA episode “Flying Supersonic” on the development of Concorde. Finally, there’s The Bloody Hundredth, the companion documentary to the Apple TV+ drama series Masters of the Air.
The Need for Speed
Films have played no small part in our collective appreciation of and enthusiasm for aviation. Here are a few worth checking out:
Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick, obviously, which rank as perhaps the two greatest movies about or involving aviation in any way, shape, or form.
Jimmy Stewart’s Strategic Air Command puts its mid-1950s roots on full display and verges on the outright corny at times, but it’s still worth watching.
The Right Stuff bridges aviation and space exploration, and its tense flying sequences and winningly romantic attitude toward test pilots ensure that it doesn’t favor one over the other.
It might not make a more conventional list of films about aviation, but the very first Iron Man captures the joy and excitement of flight like few other movies have or likely will.