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The wonder of flight has long captured the human imagination. In this beguiling history - ranging from the first aircraft to astronauts and beyond - David Darling tells the stories of the true life adventurers whose wonder has translated into bizarre contraptions, magnificent achievements and, sometimes, startling folly. Discover outrageous attempts to fly like a bird and fall from the edge of space. Meet Napoleonic ballooniste Sophie Blanchard and her daredevil husband; the real "X-Men" who flew the supersonic experimental "X-planes" for the US Air Force; stuntman Lincoln Beachey, looping-the-loop in a pinstripe suit; and, of course, The Rocket Man himself: Yves Rossy, who in 2006 was the first person to cross the English Channel using a jet-pack. Eccentric and reckless, Darling's daring cast of dreamers is guaranteed to entertain and inspire.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

A must-have A-Z guide with fascinating facts, figures, quotes and statistics from the high-flying world of aviation, From Airbus to Zeppelin has it all. D is for Desert Island Discs: just what would Dambuster Guy Gibson have liked while marooned on his desert island? E is for Everest: did you know that two Scotsmen were the first to fly over the magnificent mountain? F is for Faster than the sun: which aircraft was the first to fly faster than the Earth's rotation? A must-read for anyone interested in the world of aviation - and may win the reader a pub quiz or two!.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

In the essays collected here William Langewiesche considers how flying has altered not only how we move about the earth, but also how we view our world and our place in it. With vivid descriptions of the aesthetics and excitement of flight, Langewiesche also writes of the risks that go with this beauty: the perils of air traffic control, and the dangers of nervous passengers and bad weather. Full of spare and elegant prose, "Aloft" is a fascinating journey into the new, profound dimension that flight has added to the human experience.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Prologue: Walking Chaucer
• River fying : the Sheyenne River
• Short-hop notebook : Dakota sky
• A wall of old trees
• Short-hop notebook : math class
• River flying : the Red River
• Short-hop notebook : fame
• Afternoon at the Atomic Café
• Ground reference
• Short-hop notebook : stats
• Storm flying
• Short-hop notebook : jazz
• Tag
• Short-hop notebook : the swoop
• That thing up front
• A very deep low
• Monster sky
• Thin places and thick time : a duet for two worlds
• Deep SWE
• Collecting the horizon
• The beautiful line.

"It's almost like ballet. Preflight. Starting. Warmup. The voices from the control tower-the instructions. Taxiing. The rush down the runway. Airborne. There are names for every move. The run-up. Position and hold. Every move needs to be learned, practiced, made so familiar you feel the patterns in every other thing you do. It's technical, yes. But there is a grace to getting metal and bone into the sky." Prairie Sky is a celebration of curiosity and a book for explorers. In this collection of contemplative essays, Scott Olsen invites readers to view the world from a pilot's seat, demonstrating how, with just a little bit of altitude, the world changes, new relationships become visible, and new questions seem to rise up from the ground. Whether searching for the still-evident shores of ancient lakes, the dustbowl-era shelterbelt supposed to run the length of the country, or the even more elusive understandings of physics and theology, Olsen shares the unique perspective and insight allowed to pilots. Prairie Sky explores the reality as well as the metaphor of flight: notions of ceaseless time and boundless space, personal interior and exterior vision, social history, meteorology, and geology. Olsen takes readers along as he chases a new way of looking at the physical world and wonders aloud about how the whole planet moves in interconnected ways not visible from the ground. While the northern prairie may call to mind images of golden harvests and summer twilight such images do not define the region. The land bears marks left by gut-shaking thunderstorms, hard-frozen rivers, sweeping floods, and hurricane-size storms. Olsen takes to the mid-western sky to confront the ordinary world and reveals the magic-the wondrous and unique sights visible from the pilot's seat of a Cessna. Like Antoine de Saint-Exupery's classic work Wind, Sand and Stars, Olsen's Prairie Sky reveals the heart of what it means to fly. In the grand romantic tradition of the travel essay, it opens the dramatic paradoxes of self and collective, linear and circular, the heart and the border.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)