Here are Bleriot, Byrd, Doolittle, Alcock, Brown, Smith, Lindbergh & others. Horror-filled spectators gasped as a little plane spun crazily, hopelessly out of control, toward the grassy meadow sixty-five feet below. Seconds later, the plane righted itself as it crashed to the soft turf. A jubilant Frenchman, Louis Bleriot, had good reason to be exhilarated. He had just completed man’s first long-distance flight over water. Bleriot’s twenty-two-mile flight startled the world in 1909. Sixteen history-making flights recount all the harrowing details. Includes the successes and the spectacular failures in vivid detail.