Book reviews, short stories, and more

  Approximately 80 miles to the northeast of Atlanta, Georgia rests the Athens-Ben Epps airport and the airplanes that continuously buzz about it. With two crossing runways and a control tower proudly sporting the official logo of the University of Georgia, the airfield remains relatively busy with corporate traffic, flight instruction, and military aircraft ranging from […]

Happy Holidays from the team at Early Days Biplanes! Whatever religion you subscribe to, if you subscribe to one, we hope that it proved to be a fulfilling and very merry time. That was certainly the case on our end, with lots of exciting adventures that were born out of a visit to our home […]

No head on a quicker swivel could have seen it coming; from out of the blinding eastern sun, a circus of lethal Fokker DVIIs pounced on four Bristol Fighters in formation. At the far right of the Brisfit formation was pilot Lieutenant Coach and observer Lieutenant Adair, both noticing the attack too late. They huddled […]

The morning of May 15, 1918 birthed a milestone in the progress of aviation not only in the United States, but across the world. For the first time ever, mail was being flown on a regularly scheduled route which began in Washington, D.C. and ended in New York with one stop in Pennsylvania. Although there […]

My ideal barnstormer is a man who knows his machine like he knows the fingers on his hands. He can sense when it is happy, excited, dejected, or angry and knows how to interpret every rattle and shimmy in the stick and rudder pedals and has an extraordinarily tuned ear to the hum of its […]

One of the books on my shelf that I was most excited to read, The Air Devils delivered on all fronts regarding stunt aviation’s origins and I was left almost unwilling to close the pages upon finishing the book. Covering topics that range from the rise of flying lighter-than-air craft at a time when American […]

With no ILS needles to guide them to the ground through clouds, an engine and airframe crippled by enemy fire, and suffering from the effects of low temperatures at high altitudes, many of today’s pilots could learn numerous lessons from these steel men piloting wooden machines during the Great War and the years following. Wing […]

Another book that has remained unread on my shelf for far too long is this fabulous piece of literature, Double-Decker C.666 by Georg Wilhelm Haupt-Heydemarck. As much attention and focus is paid to the allied participation in the air war over Europe during 1914-1918, it is a welcome change of pace to read a realistic […]

I just recently finished “I Chose the Sky” by Leonard “Tich” Rochford, an account of his time in the Royal Naval Air Service and Royal Air Force during The Great War. I was very much looking forward to this piece as there aren’t many RNAS pilot memoirs in existence, at least compared to Royal Flying […]

Just a few days ago I finished the biography of a (unfortunately) relatively unknown aviation legend named E.M. “Matty” Laird. Authored by his daughter, Joan Laird Post, the book explores areas mostly unknown in Matty’s life such as insight into how he named his famous airplanes and the context for his business adventures. Joan Laird […]