The Airplane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings - Softcover

Spenser, Jay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061259209 ISBN 13: 9780061259203

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2009

Synopsis

In this entertaining history of the jetliner, Jay Spenser traces aviation's challenges from the outset, and follows the flow of the simple yet powerful ideas that led us to defy gravity. Here are the pioneers—innovators such as Otto Lilienthal, Igor Sikorsky, Louis BlÉriot, Hugo Junkers, and Jack Northrop—whose amazing contributions collectively solved the puzzle of flight. Along the way, Spenser demystifies the modern jetliner, examining the airplane from wings to flight controls to fuselages to landing gear, to show how each part came into being and evolved over time. And finally The Airplane addresses the future of aviation, outlining the breathtaking possibilities that await us tomorrow, many miles above the earth.

• Who were aviation's dreamers, and where did they get their inspiration?
• How did birds, insects, marine mammals, and fish help us to fly?
• How did the bicycle beget the airplane, and hot water heaters lead to metal fuselages?
• Who figured out how to fly without seeing the ground, enabling airline travel in all weather conditions?

About this title

About the Author:

Jay Spenser has spent a lifetime studying aviation as a museum curator at the National Air and Space Museum and the Museum of Flight, and as an aerospace industry writer. He is the co-author of 747 and lives in Seattle, Washington.

From Booklist:

Spenser organizes his history of the airplane according to the modern machine’s major components––fuselage, wings, tail, landing gear, engine, and so forth. The ungainly look of early contraptions, on view in the included historical illustrations, underscores technical evolution as airplane designers mastered the physical forces of flight. The Wright brothers are important not only for being first aloft but also for conducting the most systematic research into the problem of flight control. Without a fuselage, however, their design was a dead end. The advantage of giving an airplane such a backbone becomes apparent in Spenser’s account of innovations in fuselage construction and of airplane types that embodied them, such as the DC-3. Spencer then explains wings’ transition from wire-trussed support to stronger cantilevered support, the development of piston engines, their replacement by jet engines, and improvements in on-board navigational and engineering instrumentation. A work better suited to readers interested in engineering than to those seeking a purely pictorial history of aviation, this well conveys Spenser’s knowledge of and  enthusiasm for his subject. --Gilbert Taylor

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0061259209
• ISBN 13: 9780061259203
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352