Book won acclaim as the foremost history of one of the twentieth century's landmark achievements—human flight. In this revised and expanded third edition, Bilstein chronicles changes in military, commercial, and space aviation in the 1990s. Richly illustrated and splendidly written, book charts the manifold ways in which the airplane has touched virtually every feature of American enterprise, history, and culture—leisure and business travel, commercial transportation, national defense, and imaginative literature. 125+ lively photographs document the beauty of flying machines and the daring of the men and women who invented, built, and flew them.