Jet the cat likes to swim. When the other animals tell her that cats actually hate water, she goes in search of her true identity. After failing to fit the description of a variety of animals, Jet finally learns to embrace her unique brand of catness. A timely tale that humorously challenges labels and celebrates defining one’s own unique identity.

In the 1930s, as nations braced for war, the German military build up caught Britain and the United States off-guard, particularly in aviation technology. The unending quest for speed resulted in the need for radical alternatives to piston engines. In Germany, Dr. Hans von Ohain was the first to complete a flight-worthy turbojet engine for aircraft. It was installed in a Heinkel-designed aircraft, and the Germans began the jet age on August 27, 1939. The Germans led the jet race throughout the war and were the first to produce jet aircraft for combat operations. In England, the doggedly determined Frank Whittle also developed a turbojet engine, but without the support enjoyed by his German counterpart. The British came second in the jet race when Whittle's engine powered the Gloster Pioneer on May 15, 1941. The Whittle-Gloster relationship continued and produced the only Allied combat jet aircraft during the war, the Meteor, which was relegated to Home Defense in Britain. In America, General Electric copied the Whittle designs, and Bell Aircraft contracted to build the first American jet plane. On October 1, 1942, a lackluster performance from the Bell Airacomet, ushered in the American jet age. The Yanks forged ahead, and had numerous engine and airframe programs in development by the end of the war. But, the Germans did it right and did it first, while the Allies lagged throughout the war, only rising to technological prominence on the ashes of the German defeat. Pavelec's analysis of the jet race uncovers all the excitement in the high-stakes race to develop effective jet engines for warfare and transport.

Victoria Vantoch takes us on a fascinating journey into the golden era of air travel. The Jet Sex explores the much-mythologized stewardess within the context of the Cold War, globalization, and the emerging culture of glamour to reveal how beauty and sexuality were critical to national identity and international politics.

A fresh, unique insider’s view of what it’s like to be a woman aviator in today’s US Navy—from pedicures to parachutes, friendship to firefights. Caroline Johnson was an unlikely aviation candidate. A tall blonde debutante from Colorado, she could have just as easily gone into fashion or filmmaking, and yet she went on to become an F/A-18 Super Hornet Weapons System Officer. She was one of the first women to fly a combat mission over Iraq since 2011, and one of the first women to drop bombs on ISIS. Jet Girl tells the remarkable story of the women fighting at the forefront in a military system that allows them to reach the highest peaks, and yet is in many respects still a fraternity. Johnson offers an insider’s view on the fascinating, thrilling, dangerous and, at times, glamorous world of being a naval aviator. This is a coming-of age story about a young college-aged woman who draws strength from a tight knit group of friends, called the Jet Girls, and struggles with all the ordinary problems of life: love, work, catty housewives, father figures, make-up, wardrobe, not to mention being put into harm’s way daily with terrorist groups such as ISIS and world powers such as Russia and Iran. Some of the most memorable parts of the book are about real life in training, in the air and in combat—how do you deal with having to pee in a cockpit the size of a bumper car going 600 miles an hour? Not just a memoir, this book also aims to change the conversation and to inspire and attract the next generation of men and women who are tempted to explore a life of adventure and service.

Sometimes it takes an artist to show us that familiar things are truly remarkable. Jeffrey Milstein's elegant photographs of commercial airliners restore the rigor and glamour to our experience of air travel. They have quickly become contemporary icons, published in 2005 in photo magazine, Graphis PhotoAnnual, and American Photography Annual, and winning first place in the PDN Digital Photography Contest. For the past five years, Milstein has been taking meticulous large-format photographs of commercial airliners as they take off and land, revealing the beauty and power of these sleek but complex machines. An eloquent foreword by Walter J. Boyne helps the reader appreciate these amazing technological wonders, with their incredibly powerful engines that run for so many thousands of hours that they are more vulnerable to rust than to wear. The book gives technical data on each airplane pictured.

The discovery of the ?rst case of superluminal radio jets in our galaxy in 1994 from the bright and peculiar X-ray source GRS 1915+105 has opened the way to a major shift in the direction of studies of stellar-mass accreting binaries. The past decade has seen an impressive increase in multi-wavelength studies. It is now known that all black hole binaries in our galaxy are radio sources and most likely their radio emission originates from a powerful jet. In addition to the spectacular events related to the ejection of superluminal jets, steady jets are known from many systems. Compared with their supermassive cousins, the nuclei of active galaxies, stellar-mass X-ray binaries have the advantage of varying on time scales accessible within a human life (sometimes even much shorter than a second). This has led to the ?rst detailed studies of the relation between accretion and ejection. It is even possible that, excluding their “soft” periods, the majority of the power in gal- tic sources lies in the jets and not in the accretion ?ows. This means that until a few years ago we were struggling with a physical problem, accretion onto compact objects, without considering one of the most important components of the system. Models that associate part of the high-energy emission and even the fast aperiodic variability to the jet itself are now being proposed and jets can no longer be ignored.

The captivating story of the titans, engineers, and pilots who raced to design a safe and lucrative passenger jet. In Jet Age, journalist Sam Howe Verhovek explores the advent of the first generation of jet airliners and the people who designed, built, and flew them. The path to jet travel was triumphal and amazingly rapid-less than fifty years after the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk, Great Britain led the world with the first commercial jet plane service. Yet the pioneering British Comet was cursed with a tragic, mysterious flaw, and an upstart Seattle company put a new competitor in the sky: the Boeing 707 Jet Stratoliner. Jet Age vividly recreates the race between two nations, two global airlines, and two rival teams of brilliant engineers for bragging rights to the first jet service across the Atlantic Ocean in 1958. At the center of this story are great minds and courageous souls, including Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, who spearheaded the development of the Comet, even as two of his sons lost their lives flying earlier models of his aircraft; Sir Arnold Hall, the brilliant British aerodynamicist tasked with uncovering the Comet's fatal flaw; Bill Allen, Boeing's deceptively mild-mannered president; and Alvin "Tex" Johnston, Boeing's swashbuckling but supremely skilled test pilot. The extraordinary airplanes themselves emerge as characters in the drama. As the Comet and the Boeing 707 go head-to-head, flying twice as fast and high as the propeller planes that preceded them, the book captures the electrifying spirit of an era: the Jet Age. In the spirit of Stephen Ambrose's Nothing Like It in the World, Verhovek's Jet Age offers a gorgeous rendering of an exciting age and fascinating technology that permanently changed our conception of distance and time, of a triumph of engineering and design, and of a company that took a huge gamble and won.