Images of Aviation: Huntsville Air and Space (review)

Perhaps no other city in Alabama deserves more recognition for its aerospace history than Huntsville. Known mostly as the "Rocket City" for the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville has a rich presence in flight, which Gary Wicks chronicles in this addition to Arcadia Publishing's Images of Aviation series. Aeronautics in Huntsville goes back as early as 1900, when William L. Quick, a Madison County resident, began work on a flying machine of his own design. Alabama's first family of flight, the Quicks barnstormed the state in the 1920s with modified Standard biplanes; Cady Quick, William's youngest daughter, was one of Alabama's first women aviators. Wicks expands on the city's aviation heritage with thorough coverage of airport development in Huntsville, which began in 1931 with a small field south of the city that was superseded ten years later by a larger facility nearby. Ultimately a coalition of local, state, and federal authorities joined with local business leaders to create a new municipal authority that planned and built a new airport west of the city. When the Huntsville-Madison County airport began operations in 1967, the city boasted that it had entered the "jet age."

Not surprisingly, nearly two-thirds of the book deals with rocket and space technology, starting with the creation of the Huntsville and Redstone Arsenals in 1941 and coalescing in 1950 with the arrival of Wernher von Braun's army "rocket team." Working under the aegis of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency after 1955, von Braun's organization designed and built a series of rockets for the Army, some of which were modified to boost the country's first satellites into orbit and to put the first Americans into space in 1961. After the creation of the Marshall Space Flight Center in 1960, von Braun went to work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). His and Huntsville's greatest achievement was the Saturn family of space vehicles that fulfilled President John F. Kennedy's promise of landing a man on the moon in 1969. In some respects, Marshall's work thereafter on the space shuttle's propulsion system, the Hubble Space Telescope, and other NASA projects was anticlimactic.

The book follows the highly successful Arcadia formula with an introduction and a rich selection of high-quality illustrations from public and private collections, accompanied by well-written and informative captions. The book does not pretend to be—and no one should expect— a scholarly, analytical treatment of Huntsville's aerospace history. Nevertheless, it is disappointing that Wicks did not dig deeply enough to resolve the question of whether or not Quick's oddly configured monoplane made a short flight in 1908. He states only that the machine was "modestly successful" (p. 7) and that his sixteen-year-old son attempted a flight at an unspecified date (p. 14). Had the flight occurred it would have been the first powered heavier-than-air flight in the state, predating the Wrights in Montgomery by nearly two years. On the other hand, Wicks deserves credit for discovering that Curtiss flier Charles F. Walsh gave an exhibition in the city in 1912, providing residents with their first opportunity to see an airplane in flight. One can wish, too, that Wicks had reached back into the nineteenth century to see if there were any balloon flights in Huntsville and north Alabama. We know that aeronauts crisscrossed the nation after the Civil War, thrilling audiences at county fairs, Independence Day celebrations, and other special occasions, and it is reasonable to expect that some of them passed through Huntsville and other communities. Wicks might also have taken the opportunity to discuss how and why the private-public partnership provided the foundation for aerospace development in Huntsville in the 1950s and 1960s. It was in many ways a case study for how government and private enterprise can collaborate to bring about economic expansion and planned...