Flying on Film: A Century of Aviation in the Movies 1912-2012

Flying on Film: A Century of Aviation in the Movies 1912-2012

Flying on Film: A Century of Aviation in the Movies 1912-2012
Bear Manor Media, November 2012
ISBN-10: 1593932197

AWARDS
Honorable Mention, 2014 Hollywood Book Festival

REVIEWS
Warbird Digest, Ron Kaplan, Reel Stuff
Aviation History, Colonel Boyne
Aloft, Ted Huddter
Vintage Airplanes, Editor
Films of the Golden Age, Bob King
Distinguished Flying Cross News, Commander Charles Sweeney
Pacific Flyer, Wayman Dunlap, Editor
San Diego Union-Tribune, Captain Rick Ludwig, USN (Ret)

Airplanes and motion pictures were born within a year of one another. In 100 years they have both risen from uncertain infancy to growing adolescence to robust maturity. While Hollywood’s actors and directors learned the art of making movies, the aircraft industry and pilots learned how to conquer the sky. In peace and war, prosperity and depression, the airplanes and motion pictures have become a part of American culture.

In Flying on Film movie fans and aviation buffs can find their common bond with tiny biplanes dueling in the skies to vast armadas of bombers, from majestic China Clippers to huge 747s, from slow monoplanes to swift jets. The movies told the story of the airplane. William A. Wellman’s 1927 masterpiece Wings was the first of the breed, a standard to be emulated.

 Flying on Film tells the history behind the films, the story behind the camera. Veterans and aviators from past and present tell the real story of one of the most fascinating genres of motion pictures in Hollywood.

From the Foreword by William A. Wellman, Jr.

“Mark Carlson has produced a remarkable and insightful chronicle of a 100-year history of aviation in the movies. He sketches an incredible portrait of the films, the diversity of aircraft, and the highly skilled and courageous flyers who helped make these films the spectacles that they became.

In this book, he has flown a resolute route, through brilliant blue skies surrounded by billowy white clouds, into 100 years of aviation in the movies. It is a book my father would love.”