This is a book in three parts, with the Dole Air Derby coming last. Before that, we hear about the golden age of aviation in general and two sets of flights to Hawaii in particular: the U.S. Navy’s flying boats, and the race between the Army Air Corps and a civilian pilot. It’s all here: the huge fuel tanks, the inadequate or sometimes non-existent instruments, the fragile structures, the crash landings, the stunt flyers, everything you could want to know about the daredevil days of planes in the 1920s. The details are fascinating if you’re an aviation geek like me, but the chapters are on the long side and could probably have been broken up a bit more to make them easier to digest. ( )

The Dole Air Derby of 1927 is an event that I've been aware of forever but it's also the case that it's been literally decades since I've really thought about it, so my interest perked up immediately when I saw that there was a new book on the topic. This account is rather different in that the author is coming at the topic not as an aviation enthusiast (which he was not at the start) but as a journalist, so he's more concerned with context and how the events were covered in real time. Be that as it may what I knew of the story was that the actual race was regarded as a bloody fiasco, and it was, but not necessarily for the reasons that concerned period commentators. They tended to be fixated on the demise of Mildred Doran, the flying mascot of the plane "Miss Doran," a young woman who wound up being the Christa McAuliffe of her time and how this enterprise seemed to represent the barnstorming phenomena taken to its logically stupid conclusion.

While this is true to a degree the basic point is that while the best practice of aeronautical engineering had produced aircraft that were viable enough to make the flight from the United States to Hawaii (this is all taking place in the excitement of Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic) the hard part was that navigation techniques had a long way to go before they were truly reliable. The aircraft on the cover was not one of the Dole Derby competitors, but the Army Air Service machine "Bird of Paradise" that was purposely sent out as an "x-plane" to test long-range navigation methods and technology. The cream of the Dole competitors did their best to learn from the previous Hawaii flights (which included a USN flight of flying boats and the first civilian crossing made by the "City of Oakland") but the margins were very narrow between success and failure. Much of the rationale for the the Dole Derby was to entice Lindbergh into making another record flight, but he wanted nothing to do with the whole enterprise! ( )