When the China Clipper shattered aviation records on its maiden six-day flight from California to the Orient in 1935, the flying boat became an instant celebrity. This lively history by Robert Gandt traces the development of the great flying boats as both a triumph of technology and a stirring human drama. He examines the political, military, and economic forces that drove its development and explains the aeronautical advances that made the aircraft possible. To fully document the story he includes interviews with flying boat pioneers and a dynamic collection of photographs, charts, and cutaway illustrations.

A motor launch carrying the USS Ronald Reagan's top brass is attacked. Everyone on board is killed, including two admirals and a U.S. ambassador. The U.S. vows a swift reprisal.Enter squadron skipper Brick Maxwell and his Roadrunners—the F/A-18 Hornet strike fighter pilots aboard the Reagan. Their mission: strike deep in northern Yemen's highlands. The target: Colonel Jamal Al-Fasr, the charismatic commander who has masterminded the plot to kill the Americans.Al-Fasr is also a skilled fighter pilot who learned his craft in the U.S. He has laid a deadly trap for Maxwell and the warriors of the Reagan Strike Group. The danger lies not only in the hills of Yemen. Lurking beneath the surface of the Arabian Sea is an ex-Russian Kilo submarine, whose mission is to sink the Reagan...

As China expands its industrial might, it becomes one of the biggest oil-consuming countries in the world. And the only thing blocking China's access to an unlimited fuel supply is the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. When a Vietnamese oil rig is destroyed, China is obviously the culprit. The U.S.—recently joined in a defense pact with Vietnam—calls upon Commander Brick Maxwell to pilot the hyperadvanced Black Star stealth jet against the Chinese. But the Chinese have on their side technology to match America's—and one of Brick's old adversaries, who is hunting him with a vengeance...

Brick Maxwell and his squadron of Roadrunners are flying cover for the President of Taiwan's jetliner when it's blown from the sky. Other than a slight shimmer of light preceding the catastrophe, there's no visible reason for the explosion. But Maxwell suspects that China has stolen the plans for the Black Star—a virtually invisible superstealth fighter plane. Now a full-scale war is inevitable—unless Maxwell and a team of commandos can hijack the state-of-the-art killing machine. But with a beautiful defector of dubious loyalties guiding them, the mission could take a wrong turn at any moment...

The Gulf War has been over for ten years. It's up to pilots like Cmdr. Brick Maxwell and his glory-seeking skipper, Killer DeLancey, to keep the peace by a narrow margin—a margin called the No-Fly Zone. The Iraqi pilots sometimes buzz the borders—just close enough to shake up the U.S Hornets' nest. And everyone knows these Hornets can't sting unless the Iraqis show hostile intent.However, hostile intent is a hard thing to judge when you're in the air and the enemy is flying into your zone. When an Iraqi MiG goes down, chaos breaks out on both sides of the Zone—and peace is the last thing on anyone's mind...

When a routine American-Israeli exercise goes wrong, Brick Maxwell's wingman is shot down and taken prisoner by a Palestinian splinter group. Negotiating the flier's release is the President's shadowy, power-hungry special envoy, Rick Solares. Though the pilot is set free, Brick suspects there is more to the arrangement than meets the eye. And when the woman he loves falls victim to the terrorists, his devotion to duty turns into a desire for vengeance. With the help of his Roadrunner squadron, Brick will risk everything to make the enemy pay.

Brick Maxwell lost his best friend when squadron mate Raz Rasmussen was shot down in the Gulf War. Though Raz's body was never recovered, he was declared KIA and soon forgotten. Years later, when Raz's now-remarried wife receives a call claiming that he is alive, she frantically asks Maxwell to investigate. At first, Maxwell is ignored by the CIA—until his old enemy, Jamal Al-Fasr, is captured on the Iraq-Iran border and offers to trade himself for an American POW. Maxwell attends the exchange, in case the POW turns out to be Raz. But the CIA is working its own shady agenda—and a shocking betrayal will place Maxwell right in the kill zone...