Of Flight and Flyers

Ref: 5046

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{detailed description}Nothing has inspired the human mind to such inventions upon inventions as aviation, which has seen the fastest technological development in history. Within a lifetime fantasy has turned into common-place fact ; the Earth has shrunk within the compass of less than a day's journey and its own bounds have been transcended.
In this unique book, Oliver Stewart—First World War fighter pilot, RAF test pilot, air correspondent, Farnborough Air Show commentator and founder-editor of Aeronautics—has threaded together from eye-witness accounts, memoirs of inventors, designers, air chiefs and pilots, press and official reports and other sources, the story of manned flight from the early "flying machines" through sixty years of aviation to space travel, linking the chosen pieces with his own narrative.
The great moments in aviation's history, the triumphs and the tragedies in war and peace, the lone battles of pioneers who had the courage of their visions : all these come alive in the words of great men like the Wrights, Sir Alliott Verdon-Roe, James McCudden, Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, Wiley Post and Harold Gatty, Henri Mignet, Ernst Heinkel, Sir Frank Whittle and many others, and not least in the words of Oliver Stewart himself, who has made his own contribution to history. The feshness and passion of his writing communicate the thrill of real experience.
This is much more than a book of reminiscences. Like all true aviators Oliver Stewart lives in the future, and his is the evolutionary view. Taking the quest for speed as the key principle of powered flight, he sees aircraft and ballistic vehicles as consecutive—and early—chapters of the same story. He is also outspoken in his view that war, in developing aircraft as instruments of death, has perverted the truly scientific course of aviation.
Seventy years of flight are illustrated by thirty-two pages of remarkable photographs, many of them by Charles Brown, one of the world's finest and most daring air-to-air photographers.
{Author / Publisher / Date}by Oliver Stewart
published by Newnes 1964 1st edn. 192pp illustrated, index 16x26
{condition}near fine in slightly torn d/j
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