From School Library Journal
Grade 3-6-An introduction to 17 flying machines, from the earliest planes to the modern Mars Pathfinder. Each entry covers a spread, with a picture illustrating the flight facing a page of text; a sidebar with a diagram of the airplane, spacecraft, or dirigible; and a few added details. The entries cover well-known flights and events, such as the Wright brothers' flight, the Spirit of St. Louis's flight over the Atlantic Ocean, Chuck Yeager's supersonic Glamorous Glennis, the Apollo 11 flight to the moon, and the space shuttle Columbia's maiden voyage. Other entries include the cross-country flight of the Vin Fiz, the Floyd Bennett trip to the South Pole, Wiley Post's round-the-world flight in the Winnie Mae, and the Lockheed Electra of Amelia Earhart. The text is concise and readable; the colorful illustrations depict inspiring views of the planes and spacecraft in flight. An appendix chronicles the ultimate fate of each machine and the endpapers compare the relative size of these vehicles in scale outlines of each. An informative and attractive work, comparable in quality and visual appeal to O'Brien's The Great Ships (Walker, 2001).
Jeffrey A. French, Euclid Public Library, OHCopyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Gr. 3-6. O'Brien offers a fine introduction to groundbreaking flights in this succinct, well-designed volume. The highly readable accounts begin with Otto Lilienthal's experiments with gliders, and cover flights by such notables as the Wright brothers, Richard Byrd, Charles Lindberg, Chuck Yeager, and Amelia Earhart, ending with the Pathfinder's landing on Mars. A few more obscure aviation pioneers are also included, such as Cal Rodgers, who made a series of crash landings across America in 1911. Each flight is described in the same two-page format, with a dramatic painting of the aircraft on the left side of the spread, and a few well-written paragraphs describing the flight on the right, along with a line drawing of the aircraft and a few significant facts about it. Those doing reports on any of the subjects covered here will, no doubt, need to look elsewhere for additional information. This is a browser's delight, however, packaged in an eye-catching format. A page at the back describes where some of the famous aircraft are now on view.
Todd MorningCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
