History of United States Naval Aviation

by
Archibald D. Turnbull
Captain, USNR,
Deputy Director of Naval Records and History
Clifford L. Lord
Lieutenant Commander, USNR,
Formerly Head of the Naval Aviation History Unit

Contents

List of Illustrations

Technical Details

Edition Used

The edition transcribed here is the first edition (1949). It is in the public domain because the copyright was not renewed in 1976‑1977 as then required by law in order to be maintained: details here on the copyright law involved.

Illustrations

In the printed edition, after the frontispiece, the 45 photographs are gathered in a 16‑page signature preceding Chapter XVIII, page 193. Taking advantage of the Web, I've moved each of them to accompany relevant text: the links are of course to the new locations.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.) ▸ Actually, as a test, I dictated about forty pages to my phone, but the principle is the same: I actually read what I give you.

My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree; a red background would mean that the page had not been proofread. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was very well proofread. The inevitable typographical errors were few, and all trivial, most of them in proper names: I marked them with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the underscored words to read what was actually printed. Similarly, glide your cursor over bullets before measurements: they provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles. Yards and tons, which are close to meters and tonnes, are not given conversions; and whenever it wasn't clear to me whether statute or nautical miles were meant, I usually omitted the feature there too.

A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked. They are also few.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

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The icon I use to indicate this subsite is a colorized version of the book's photograph of Eugene Ely's flight from the deck of the Birmingham in 1910: the world's first takeoff from the deck of a ship. I've colorized it in red, white, and blue: something like navy blue — and red for dangerous, which almost everything in this book truly was.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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