Test pilots: The frontiersmen of flight

"If you really wish to learn" wrote Wilbur Wright, "you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial". And even before the Wright Flyer took off on its history-making first flight, intrepid researchers had been testing many different flying machines: the hapless tower jumpers of the Dark Ages; the balloonist of the eighteenth century; the glider builders of the nineteenth. In Test Pilots, Richard P. Hallion chronicles the history of test pilots from these early explorers to today's military men.