Test pilots The frontiersmen of flight Author:Richard Hallion _If you really wish to learn_ wrote Wilbur Wright, _you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial_. And even before the Wright Flyer took off on its history-making first flight, intrepid researchers had been testing many different flying machines: the hapless tower jumpers of the Dark Ages; the balloonist of the ... more »eighteenth century; the glider builders of the nineteenth. In Test Pilots, Richard P. Hallion chronicles the history of test pilots from these early explorers to today's military men.« less