Borne on the South Wind

By Frank Joseph Rowe

Borne on the South Wind This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1880652331
• ISBN13: 9781880652336
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Wichita Eagle & Beacon Pub Co
• Length: 244 Pages
• Weight: 2.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.5" x 1.0" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Early Aviation in USA

My great uncle was listed in this book as one of the "whtchimacallits" and he certainly was not mad. He build his plane in western Kansas and exchanged ideas with the Wright brothers. He was also an artist trained in fresco and painted many of the back of the alters in churches throughout Missouri and Kansas. It is rather rare that a person has a combined interest and skills in art and science. He returned to his home in Luxembourg when his mother became ill. He left the plane he had build in a barn in Kansas. As a child younger than age five, I can remember the daytime sky becoming almost dark with all the planes that flew over our western suburban Kansas City home on their way to the East. One of the likely reasons for the early experimental air craft choosing central Kansas was that there were many places to land if they got into trouble. Cow pies are often very soft!

Kansas--A Leader in Aviation? Well, yes, I Guess So

There are few more significant areas of historical study for twentieth century America than the development of aviation. For residents of the Midwestern part of the United States aviation was an especially significant engine of change, owing to the unique combination of open spaces, relatively small numbers of population, distances between urban areas, and, a pioneering spirit. "Borne on the South Wind" is a useful large-format illustrated history chronicling the growth of aviation in one Great Plains state. The authors describe in eight chapters of narrative and more than 250 photographs the aviation story of Kansas. Beginning with lighter-than-air activities with kites and balloons in the nineteenth century, Frank Joseph Rowe and Craig Miner move quickly into a discussion of the oddities of early aviation, called here "watchimacallits" because they were clearly weird contraptions constructed by inventors, some of whom were both brilliant and mad. They expend some effort dealing with air meets, barnstorming, and daredevils but then move on to the much more significant air mail activities of the 1920s and 1930s, the first time airplanes were widely acknowledged as having much practical application. There is, appropriately enough, both a geographical and chronological center to Borne on the South Wind. In the first category, Wichita occupies center stage in this narrative. The city has for decades billed itself as the "Air Capitol of the World," and while that is certainly an overstatement, it is one of the significant centers of aviation in the U.S. Accordingly, Rowe and Miner describe in great detail the rise of the general aviation industry there, led by such entrepreneurs as Walter and Olive Ann Beech, Clyde Cessna, and William P. Lear. The three companies those business leaders founded and operated in Wichita, accounted for the lion's share of whatever claims the city and the state had to leadership in aviation and account for the bulk of the discussion in this book. The chronological emphasis is on the World War II era, for once again, that it where the bulk of the importance lay. The major aircraft manufacturers in the state--essentially Beechcraft, Cessna, and Lear in Wichita--received millions of dollars in defense contracts to produce military versions of their civil planes and to design and build both new models and components for other aircraft. Because of the knowledge base, skilled work force, infrastructure already in place in the city at the outbreak of World War II, other manufacturing firms soon set up shop in Wichita and any number of other craft were manufactured there as a result. Boeing, North American Aviation, and a host of smaller firms did business in the region during the war. Indeed, as a chart from the Aircraft Industries Association of America concluded about 34,500 aircraft were built in Kansas during the war, 11.5 percent of the U.S. total. Clearly, this marked the high water mark of Kansas contribution to U.S. avia