100 Years of Flight

Frank H. Winter, National Air and Space Museum
F. Robert van der Linden, National Air and Space Museum

In just 100 years, air and space exploration has progressed from a 12-second, 120-foot flight by two brothers to nearly 30 years of sustained flight by a spacecraft, now eight billion miles from Earth, traveling at almost 40,000 miles per hour.

Drawing on the extensive collection of the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), and personal collections, this full-color, beautifully illustrated book chronicles the most significant accomplishments in aerospace history over the past 100 years. In timeline fashion, you'll read brief excerpts from hundreds of news articles reporting on significant accomplishments in flight. Through brief introductory essays, you will learn what made each decade of flight most significant. Concluding essays by John D. Anderson Jr. and Roger D. Launius of the NASM look at what lies ahead. Foreword by A. Scott Crossfield.

The book was commissioned in celebration of the 100th anniversary of powered flight. Winter and van der Linden are both curators at the NASM, and authors of several acclaimed books on air and space history and the "Out of the Past" column published monthly in Aerospace America.