The Airplane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I picked up Jay Spenser's "The Airplane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings" at the airport (how appropriate), and I haven't been able to put it down. Fans of James Burke's "Connections" will find much to like about Spenser's approach. Rather than setting out a chronological history of flight, Spenser explores the history of the airplane's component parts: fuselage, wings, empennage (tail assembly), controls, flight deck, landing gear, propulsion system, cabin comforts and system integration. The book is a bit redundant in spots, but that's to be expected given the overlapping nature of some of the discoveries involved--it's a small price to pay for a refreshing approach to the oft-examined history of flight.
Spenser explains all sorts of interesting things, like why biplanes looked the way they did (it has to do with the Australian invention of the box kite), why the Fokker DVII fighter was the only airplane to be specifically mentioned in the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, why jets have swept wings, why flaps are used to increase the size of an aircraft's wing on landing, and how the pioneers of aviation learned by trial and error (sometimes fatal error) to design and build aircraft that can each carry hundreds of people across continents.
Spenser's narrative is entertainingly attentive to the little quirks of history--for example, the Wright Brothers were accomplished bicyclists, and their understanding of the need to lean into turns and maintain balance contributed directly to their brilliant design of contol across all three axes of flight. The Europeans, in contrast, thought of airplanes as airborne sailing ships or automobiles, which caused them to invent flying bricks that could barely turn and couldn't begin to manage pitch, yaw and roll. By 1908, the Wright's carefull experiments had produced a fully controllable aircraft that could outfly anything anyone else had to offer. The world quickly overtook the Wrights, however, and the history of the airplane since 1908 has been the story of a million strokes of genius, each leading in its own fascinating way to the modern airplane.
Spenser has done a superb job of describing the process by which brilliant and courageous people, exchanging ideas and building on experience, have dramatically changed the world we live in.

Click Here to see more reviews about: The Airplane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings

Get 25% OFF

Click here for more information about The Airplane: How Ideas Gave Us Wings