Undaunted: Long-Distance Flyers in the Golden Age of Aviation

Patricia A. Myers is a historian at the Historic Sites and Archives
Service, Alberta Community Development. She is the author of Sky Riders:
An Illustrated History of Aviation in Alberta, 1906–1945 and
Preserving Women’s History.

Spencer Dunmore is a veteran writer in aviation history. Undaunted tells
the tales of those intrepid early flyers who dared to fly farther than
anyone before them.

Dunmore describes long-distance flying from 1908 through the 1930s
through a series of individual flights. Each one is a tale of
technological wizardry, of human derring-do and ingenuity, of pluck and
determination, of a desire for glory, and more than a little
foolishness.

Dunmore begins his book with Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s 1908
attempt to keep his dirigible in the air for 24 hours. Soon we’re
crossing the English Channel, first with Louis Bleriot and then with
Harriet Quimby. Then it is across the Atlantic, an ill-fated race to
Hawaii, flights to Khartoum, and all around the world. Airplanes were
the marvels of the age.

But not everything took place in the air. Dunmore notes the appeal of
these often dangerous flights that caught the imagination of a general
public eager to see just how far this shining new technology could go.
The starts and finishes of races drew great crowds, and the exploits of
Charles Lindbergh, Amy Johnson, Harry Hawker, Howard Hughes, Ruth Elder,
and Amelia Earhart provided miles of newsprint copy and an equal amount
of hero worship.

Dunmore does a good job describing the many flights and capturing some
of the excitement and wonder these air exploits created. Unfortunately,
the book is too sparsely illustrated; more photographs would have upped
the emotional ante as well as given a better understanding of the crowds
and the technologies of this era of flight. Although Undaunted brings
all these flights into one book, we don’t really learn more about
them. The book depends heavily on a small number of secondary sources,
so there are few new insights into the behaviour, or the impulses,
behind the flights and their mass appeal. Still, Dunmore’s
introduction to long-distance flying before World War II is accessible
and would be a particularly useful resource for introducing
schoolchildren to non-fiction.