Quest For Flight

Download or read book Quest for Flight written by Gary B. Fogel and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2012-10-11 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wright brothers have long received the lion’s share of credit for inventing the airplane. But a California scientist succeeded in flying gliders twenty years before the Wright’s powered flights at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Quest for Flight reveals the amazing accomplishments of John J. Montgomery, a prolific inventor who piloted the glider he designed in 1883 in the first controlled flights of a heavier-than-air craft in the Western Hemisphere. Re-examining the history of American aviation, Craig S. Harwood and Gary B. Fogel present the story of human efforts to take to the skies. They show that history’s nearly exclusive focus on two brothers resulted from a lengthy public campaign the Wrights waged to profit from their aeroplane patent and create a monopoly in aviation. Countering the aspersions cast on Montgomery and his work, Harwood and Fogel build a solidly documented case for Montgomery’s pioneering role in aeronautical innovation. As a scientist researching the laws of flight, Montgomery invented basic methods of aircraft control and stability, refined his theories in aerodynamics over decades of research, and brought widespread attention to aviation by staging public demonstrations of his gliders. After his first flights near San Diego in the 1880s, his pursuit continued through a series of glider designs. These experiments culminated in 1905 with controlled flights in Northern California using tandem-wing Montgomery gliders launched from balloons. These flights reached the highest altitudes yet attained, demonstrated the effectiveness of Montgomery’s designs, and helped change society’s attitude toward what was considered “the impossible art” of aerial navigation. Inventors and aviators working west of the Mississippi at the turn of the twentieth century have not received the recognition they deserve. Harwood and Fogel place Montgomery’s story and his exploits in the broader context of western aviation and science, shedding new light on the reasons that California was the epicenter of the American aviation industry from the very beginning.

Download or read book The Vanishing of Flight MH370 written by Richard Quest and published by Berkley Books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CNN Aviation Correspondent Richard Quest offers a gripping and definitive account of the disappearance of Malaysian Airline Flight MH370 in March 2014. On March 8, 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared with barely a trace, carrying 239 people on board--seemingly vanishing into the dark night. The airplane's whereabouts and fate would quickly become one of the biggest aviation mysteries of our time... Richard Quest, CNN's Aviation Correspondent, was one of the leading journalists covering the story. In a coincidence, Quest had interviewed one of the two pilots a few weeks before the disappearance. It is here that he begins his gripping account of those tense weeks in March, presenting a fascinating chronicle of an international search effort, which despite years of searching and tens of millions of dollars spent has failed to find the plane. Quest dissects what happened in the hours following the plane's disappearance and chronicles the days and weeks of searching, which led to nothing but increasing despair. He takes apart the varying responses from authorities and the discrepancies in reports, the wide range of theories, the startling fact that the plane actually turned around and flew in the opposite direction, and what solutions the aviation industry must now implement to ensure it never happens again. What emerges is a riveting chronicle of a tragedy that continues to baffle everyone from aviation experts to satellite engineers to politicians--and which to this day worries the traveling public that it could happen again. INCLUDES PHOTOS

Download or read book The Crash of Flight 3804 written by Charlotte Dennett and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Charlotte Dennett has written an excellent book summarizing the geopolitics of the Middle East historically through to current events. . . . This is an amazing piece of historical writing. . . . Students, foreign affairs ‘experts’ and officials should have this work as required reading."—Jim Miles, The Palestine Chronicle Unraveling the mystery of a master spy’s death by following pipelines and mapping wars in the Middle East In 1947, Daniel Dennett, America’s sole master spy in the Middle East, was dispatched to Saudi Arabia to study the route of the proposed Trans-Arabian Pipeline. It would be his last assignment. A plane carrying him to Ethiopia went down, killing everyone on board. Today, Dennett is recognized by the CIA as a “Fallen Star” and an important figure in US intelligence history. Yet the true cause of his death remains clouded in secrecy. In The Crash of Flight 3804, investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett digs into her father’s postwar counterintelligence work, which pitted him against America’s wartime allies—the British, French, and Russians—in a covert battle for geopolitical and economic influence in the Middle East. Through stories and maps, she reveals how feverish competition among superpower intelligence networks, military, and Big Oil interests have fueled indiscriminate attacks and targeted killings that continue to this day—from Jamal Khashoggi’s murder to drone strikes. The book delivers an irrefutable indictment of these devastating forces and how the brutal violence they incite has shaped the Middle East and birthed an era of endless wars. The Crash of Flight 3804 provides important context for understanding the region, while bringing new questions to the fore: To what lengths has the United States negotiated with the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and ISIS to secure Big Oil’s holdings in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen? Was the Pentagon’s goal of defeating ISIS a fraudulent pretext for America’s occupation of Syrian eastern provinces and a land grab for oil? What part does Ukraine play in the energy-dominance struggle between the US and Russia? Did the infamous double agent Kim Philby, who worked for the British while secretly spying for the Russians, have anything to do with Dennett’s death? Why have the US and China made North Africa the next major battleground in the Great Game for Oil? Part personal pilgrimage, part deft critique, Dennett’s insightful reportage examines what happens to international relations when oil wealth hangs in the balance and shines a glaring light on what so many have actually been dying for.

Download or read book Star Wars written by Timothy Zahn and published by Lucas Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Luke Skywalker and his wife, Mara Jade, journey to the planet of Nirauan to combat an insidious enemy and salvage a part of Jedi history.

Download or read book Fatal Crossing written by Valerie van Heest and published by In-Depth Editions, LLC. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On June 23, 1950, a DC-4 with 58 souls on board flew from New York toward Minnesota. Minutes after midnight Captain Robert Lind requested a lower altitude as he began crossing the lake, but Air Traffic Control could not comply. That was the last communication with Northwest Airlines Flight 2501. The Navy and Coast Guard never located the wreck, rendering it impossible to determine a cause for this tragic accident.

Download or read book The Flight from Authority written by Jeffrey Stout and published by Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeffrey Stout argues that modern thought was born in a crisis of authority, took shape in flight from authority, and aspired to autonomy from all traditional influence. The quest for autonomy was an attempt to begin completely anew. As such it was bound to fail. Stout traces the secularization of public discourse and its effect on the relation between theism and culture as well as the severance of morality from traditional moorings in favor of autonomy. He is unabashedly historical in his approach, defending the thesis that all thought is historically conditioned and that historical insight is essential to self-understanding. Each section of the book takes up a major problem in contemporary philosophy - the nature of knowledge, the rationality of religious belief, the autonomy of morality- and sets that problem against the background of early modern disputes over authority. The result is simultaneously a critique of ahistorical biases, a survey of major developments in modern thought, and a normative treatment of the problems addressed. The book culminates in the final section with an account of post-Kantian concern with the autonomy of morals. Morality attained relative independence as a form of discourse only in the modern period, but the nature of this independence is distorted when construed in foundationalist or Kantian terms. After criticizing methodological assumptions in recent moral philosophy and religious ethics, Stout sketches his own account of the emergence of autonomy for morality, stressing the need for substantial rethinking of the relationship between religion and ethics. In a concluding chapter, he places his own position in relation to the philosophical tradition descendant from Hegel.

Download or read book The Crash Detectives written by Christine Negroni and published by Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating exploration of how humans and machines fail - leading to air disasters from Amelia Earhart to MH370 - and how the lessons learned from these accidents have made flying safer. In The Crash Detectives, veteran aviation journalist and air safety investigator Christine Negroni takes the reader inside crash investigations from the early days of the jet age to the present, including the search for answers about what happened to the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. As Negroni dissects each accident, she explores the common themes and, most importantly, what has been learned from them to make planes safer. Indeed, as Negroni shows, virtually every aspect of modern pilot training, airline operation and aircraft design has been shaped by lessons learned from disaster. Along the way, she also details some miraculous saves, when quick-thinking pilots averted catastrophe and kept hundreds of people alive. Tying in aviation science, performance psychology and extensive interviews with pilots, engineers, human factors specialists, crash survivors and others involved in accidents all over the world, The Crash Detectives is an alternately terrifying and inspiring book that might just cure your fear of flying, and will definitely make you a more informed passenger.