How five daring women defied all odds and made aviation history
Between the world wars, no sport was more popular, or more dangerous, than airplane racing. While male pilots were lauded as heroes, the few women who dared to fly were more often ridiculed—until a cadre of women pilots banded together to break through the entrenched prejudice.
Fly Girls weaves together the stories of five remarkable women: Florence Klingensmith, a high school dropout from Fargo, North Dakota; Ruth Elder, an Alabama divorcée; Amelia Earhart, the most famous, but not necessarily the most skilled; Ruth Nichols, who chafed at her blue blood family’s expectations; and Louise Thaden, the young mother of two who got her start selling coal in Wichita. Together, they fought for the chance to fly and race airplanes—and in 1936, one of them would triumph, beating the men in the toughest air race of them all.
Shelby American didn’t last long, but it was a flame that burned incandescently before being extinguished by corporate politics. In less than a decade, it created a legacy that will be revered as long as cars still roar around racetracks. Now, on the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of this iconic company, Shelby American: The Renegades Who Built the Cars, Won the Races, and Lived the Legend relates how the saga unfolded, as told by the men and women who were there at the time.
Although Carroll Shelby was the focal point of the publicity his company generated, Shelby American was staffed by a who’s who of racing legends, from Phil Remington and Ken Miles to Peter Brock and Carroll Smith. And while the shop is often depicted as a menagerie of Southern California hot rodders, it also embraced mechanics and fabricators from Canada, England, Switzerland, Australia, and New Zealand. Like the Cobra itself, the company magically came together as a whole that was greater than its constituent parts.
By incorporating the recollections of dozens of lesser-known crewmen, Shelby American goes behind the scenes to tell long untold and misunderstood stories―the cheat embedded in the turbine Indy car, the oiling woes that sunk the tunnel-port Trans-Am Mustang, even details about the build of the first Cobra in Dean Moon’s cramped garage in Santa Fe Springs. The book also delves into the personalities and hijinks that made Shelby American such a vibrant place to work, whether they were transforming humdrum Mustangs into race-ready GT350 or fighting shop wars with cherry bombs and M-80s.
Always standing above it all was Shelby himself. Dynamic, charismatic, mercurial, mercenary, and a little bit dangerous, he had to fight Ford bean counters as fiercely as he dueled with Enzo Ferrari. But for a few magical years, Shelby managed to beat both of them at their own games.
The brave efforts of the pilots and crew of the RAF during the Second World War are well-known but there was another body of aviators that played a significant role in the conflict – the men and women of the civilian airlines.
The British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) was formed shortly after the outbreak of war in November 1939 by the amalgamation of Imperial Airways and British Airways. During the war BOAC operated as directed by the Secretary of State for Air, initially as the transport service for the RAF and with no requirement to act commercially. The inaugural BOAC had eighty-two aircraft, a large proportion of which were seaplanes and flying boats. With 54,000 miles of air routes over many parts of the world, ranging from the Arctic to South Africa, from the Atlantic coast of America to the eastern coast of India, the aircraft of the BOAC kept wartime Britain connected with its colonies and the free world, often under enemy fire. Over these routes, carrying mail, cargo and personnel, the men and machines of BOAC flew in the region of 19,000,000 miles a year.
There can rarely have been a moment, throughout the war, when aircraft of the British merchant air service were not flying somewhere along the routes, despite losses from enemy action. This book explores much of their war history between 1939 and 1944 (the year that marked the 25th anniversary of British commercial aviation), something of their lives and their achievements in linking up the battlefronts – at times cut off from any direct land or sea contacts with the Home Front – and in transporting supplies through the new, dangerous and often uncharted regions of the air. With the ‘Speedbird’ symbol or the Union Flag emblazoned on its aircraft the BOAC really did fly the flag for Britain throughout the wartime world.
