The Conquest of the Air

About This Book

For most of human history, flight was the one thing we watched and could not do. Then, in the space of a single lifetime, we went from a paper bag rising over a French town to a metal tube crossing an ocean while its passengers slept. The Conquest of the Air is the whole of that story, told from the ground up.

This is not a catalog of airplanes. It is the human drama of the most improbable technology we ever built: the bicycle makers who solved the problem the experts couldn't, the aces who invented aerial war, the barnstormers and record-breakers of the golden age, the engineers who chased the sound barrier and the ones who learned — from wreckage — how to make flying the safest thing you can do. E.B Cohen braids the how-it-happened with the how-it-works, explaining lift and jet engines and the invisible highways of air traffic control in plain language, and correcting the myths that have grown up around all of it.

From Cayley and Lilienthal to Kitty Hawk; from the Red Baron to the Battle of Britain; from the Comet's tragedy to the 747's triumph; from deregulation and the rise of Airbus to the 737 MAX reckoning, sustainable fuel, and the return of supersonic flight — here is the complete arc, carried right up to the eVTOL air taxi and NASA's X-59 in 2026. A single, rigorous, deeply readable volume for anyone who has ever looked up.