First Across is the exciting story of the first transatlantic flight. The flight, made in 1919, took a six-man crew nearly three weeks to complete. This book describes in detail the entire operation: the planning, the men and their aircraft, the primitive radio communication, and method of air navigation. In First Across Richard K. Smith has used photographs, cartoons, and even advertisements of the era to help evoke that spring of 1919, an important moment in the history of transportation.

During the summer of 1927, three pilots prepared for a historic journey from Long Island's Roosevelt Field--a nonstop flight between New York and Paris. This work chronicles the daring feats of these courageous adventurers and the aftermath of their flights. Photos.

Walter Hinton was a pilot on the first plane to cross the Atlantic (eight years before Lindbergh)--a four-engine, Navy-Curtiss flying boat with a crew of six, in May 1919. Based on more than 40 hours of personal interviews with Hinton, this volume chronicles that first flight and Hinton's other remarkable adventures in aviation--which include being lost in a downed balloon in the Canadian Arctic and believed dead, making the first flight to Rio de Janeiro from New York, pursuing the first aerial exploration of the Amazon, and undertaking a nationwide promotion of aviation and airports for the Exchange Clubs in the United States. With the dramatic and adventurous story of Hinton, a lost chapter in the history of flight in America is uncovered.

Lindbergh's own account of his historic transatlantic solo flight in 1927.