Realizing the Dream of Flight: Biographical Essays in Honor of the Centennial of Flight, 1903-2003 (review)

As indicated by the subtitle, this volume is a set of biographical essays prepared in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first powered flight. It consists of eleven essays on individuals, some already well-known and some not, and one concluding essay that discusses the construction and flight of a replica of the Wrights' 1902 glider. The essays span both aviation and rocketry.

In choosing the subjects to include in this volume, coeditors Virginia Dawson and Mark Bowles sought to emphasize the diversity of people devoted to the dream of flight. The book's first essay, by Amy Sue Bix, examines the life of Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman to earn a pilot's license. The second, by Susan Ware, examines the life of famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart. Both place their subjects in the larger context of American gender relations, drawing out arguments that women were acceptable in aviation so long as they were entertainment. As aviation became "big business," they were increasingly shunned.

While Bessie Coleman never succeeded in developing a profitable flying career and died in an April 1926 plane crash, Benjamin Davis, Jr., the first black officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps and commander of the 99th Fighter Squadron during World War II, had a stellar career despite his race, as Alan Gropman shows. The 99th is better known as the home of the Tuskegee Airmen; Davis was their leader throughout World War II and retired from the U.S. Air Force as a lieutenant general in 1975.

Three essays examine (male) business leaders. William Leary's discusses the relationship between Juan Trippe and Charles Lindbergh and their respective roles in developing Pan American World Airways. Similarly, David Lewis addresses the efforts of two men, Eddie Rickenbacker and Johnny Miller, to demonstrate the value of airmail service via autogyro in 1939. And Roger Bilstein traces the career of Donald Douglas, founder of the Douglas Aircraft Company.

Engineers Robert Gilruth, Wernher von Braun, and Hugh Dryden are the subjects of essays by Roger Launius, Andrew Dunbar, and Michael Gorn. Gilruth rose through the ranks of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) to lead the Space Task Group, becoming the first director of the Manned Space Center in Houston. Von Braun, of course, brought German rocketry to the United States, and Dunbar's essay recounts his journey from Nazi rocketeer to American hero, focusing on his management style. Finally, Gorn's piece seeks to rescue from obscurity Hugh Dryden, the self-effacing final director of NACA and first deputy administrator of NASA. Dryden, he argues, redirected NACA toward space-related research during the 1950s, a contribution to the space age that has so far gone unnoticed by historians.

Three other essays complete this volume. Tom Crouch explores the role of popularizers of space exploration through a profile of Willy Ley, who had worked with von Braun in the early 1930s before fleeing Germany for the United States. In a study of Curtis LeMay's career in building American strategic airpower, Tami Biddle tries to rescue his reputation as a peacemaker in the wake of recent arguments that he had been looking for opportunities to launch a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Finally, the volume concludes with an essay on the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum's decision to commission a replica of the Wright's 1902 glider. Part of the museum's effort to commemorate the centennial anniversary of flight, the replica flew 120 times during 2002.

All the essays in this volume are well chosen, and with the exception of Gropman's on Davis, well-written also. Gropman leaves one wondering what General Davis actually did during his thirty-year career after World War II. For a slightly different reason, Crouch's essay...