Fight for the Skies: The Early Days of Flight: 1909–1933

The riveting story of the birth of British aviation, spanning daredevil Edwardians hopping across the English Channel to the creation of lethal new military tools used during World War I.

The first ten years of British aviation are astounding. They are bookended by Louis Blériot crossing the Channel in 1909 and Alcock and Brown’s journey across the Atlantic a decade later. Between those two globally celebrated events sits the grim battle for air supremacy over Flanders that drove the innovation to make that second feat possible. All subsequent aviation owes its genesis to those Edwardian amateur pilots and the World War I military aviators who followed them.

But in popular memory these fearless men and women have been overshadowed by later pioneers: Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh in the late 1920s and ‘The Few’ in 1940. And their revolutionary ‘machines’ are overlooked in favor of Spitfires, Lancasters, and then jets. Similarly, most historians of the RAF (only founded in April 1918)—jealous of its hard-won independence from the army and navy, gloss over its precursors—the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Navy Air Service, anxious to get to the Battle of Britain and the Blitz without delay.

The Fight for the Skies tells the story of this first phase of flight neither as a chronicle of events nor a catalogue of pilots and their planes but as a narrative through the lives of a few central but overlooked players. More widely, the book uses flying as a prism through which to map the political, cultural, and social shifts from the Edwardian era to the early days of flight as aviation matures from dangerous niche sport to vital military tool in preparation for World War I.