Air Heart Taking Flight

Uses extracts from journals, diaries, and memoirs, as well as rare photographs and drawings, to provide a history of humanity's attempts at flight, including kites, balloons, rockets, and steerable airships.

In October 1944 Nadine Ramsey was thirty-three and she was flying the cutting-edge P-51 Mustang to New Jersey, its last stop before heading to the war in Europe. The irrepressible young woman from Wichita had long been determined to fly and the gathering storm clouds of World War II had provided an unexpected opportunity. Taking Flight is the inspiring story of a girl from Depression-era Kansas who overcame tremendous challenges and defied convention to become an elite pilot—one of the few American women to fly fighter aircraft during World War II. Taking Flight follows Nadine as she became one of 1,102 women to join the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots and one of only 303 WASPs to take to the skies in military cockpits, transporting aircraft to bases across the nation for use in the theaters of war. This book marks her milestones: the first Kansas woman to earn a commercial pilot license; among the earliest women to fly the US Air Mail; one of only 26 WASPs who flew the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, a fighter aircraft—and the first woman to own one; the only woman in the country to instruct male pilots to fly fighter planes after the war. Disbanded in late 1944 to make way for male pilots and barred from piloting for commercial airlines, the WASPs spent the next three decades fighting to win veteran status. Taking Flight: The Nadine Ramsey Story is a profile in courage of a woman who helped clear the flight path for today’s female combat and commercial aviators.

Taking Flight explores the emergence of commercial aviation between the world wars—and in the midst of the Great Depression—to show that the industry’s dramatic growth resulted from a unique combination of federal policy, technological innovations, and public interest in air travel. Historian M. Houston Johnson V traces the evolution of commercial flying from the US Army’s trial airmail service in the spring of 1918 to the passage of the pivotal Air Commerce Act of 1938. Johnson emphasizes the role of federal policy—particularly as guided by both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt—to reveal the close working relationship between federal officials and industry leaders, as well as an increasing dependence on federal assistance by airline, airframe, and engine manufacturers. Taking Flight highlights the federal government’s successful efforts to foster a nascent industry in the midst of an economic crisis without resorting to nationalization, a path taken by virtually all European countries during the same era. It also underscores an important point of continuity between Hoover’s policies and Roosevelt’s New Deal (a sharp departure from many interpretations of Depression-era business history) and shows how both governmental and corporate actors were able to harness America’s ongoing fascination with flying to further a larger economic agenda and facilitate the creation of the world’s largest and most efficient commercial aviation industry. This glimpse into the golden age of flight contributes not only to the history of aviation but also to the larger history of the United States during the Great Depression and the period between the world wars.

This poetry anthology promises to take your mind and soul on a lyrical journey, leaving your spirit wanting more!

I have the back cover designer working on the wording for the back cover. I require no help.

Commercial aviation took shape in Hong Kong as the city developed into a powerful economy. Rather than accepting air travel as an inevitability in the era of global mobility, John Wong argues that Hong Kong’s development into a regional and global airline hub was not preordained. By underscoring the shifting process through which this hub emerged, Hong Kong Takes Flight aims to describe globalization and global networks in the making. Viewing the globalization of the city through the prism of its airline industry, Wong examines how policymakers and businesses asserted themselves against international partners and competitors in a bid to accrue socioeconomic benefits, negotiated their interests in Hong Kong’s economic success, and articulated their expressions of modernity.

Flight attendant Robbie Mallory is quite adept at resisting men interested only in casual flirtation ... but what about Captain Tyler Lang?