And also by the women who flew it!
For Tintin fans this website is amazing: someone has gone through each book and identified all the planes (scroll down a bit and click on the cover for planes in that book). The same for this site listing all the cars.
All the cars and planes were real vehicles, which I never realised as a child, and I now find really interesting. Interestingly the books were updated over the years, being re-drawn in colour and changing the vehicles to more modern ones, e.g. a black and white Hawker Hart biplane being changed to a Spitfire.
Example which should be easily recognisable:
The F-regs looks authentic as well 
Currently reading this repeatedly. Unfortunately Arthur falls out of the plane throwing a first aid kit to an injured mountain climber, but is luckily wearing a parachute and lands on the beach, so a happy ending.
I’ve also tried this but it’s a bit advanced for us at the moment 
The plane is clockwork (of course)
So cute !
Thanks Capitaine !!
That schtroumph picture reminded me of watching 1h of failed start attempts of this beauty in Calais
On the subject of children’s books, the highlight of visiting my grandparents was reading these:
I re-read The Camels are Coming when I was about 20 and enjoyed it, then read another and found it a bit formulaic and the characters two dimensional. I’m scared to read any more in case it destroys the great Biggles adventures I’ve had in my head since a young age, and a large early motivation to wanting to fly.
Are there any other real flying-based children’s books? Something like the Swallows and Amazons books for sailing?
Yes, I was very upset recently when reading a book where Biggles meets a polar bear in the southern hemisphere.
Project Gutenberg has several of ‘the Aeroplane Boys’ books which are of their time, but interesting enough for a quick read.
Peter wrote:
Just finished Digital Apollo. It’s a more high level look at the programme, but still with loads of fascinating detail.
Thanks for the recommendation.
Myself being a ‘humanities sensitive’ engineer, I really enjoyed this book. The author gives quite a lot of detail on the hardware and software itself (referencing sources), but at the same time consistently zooms out to show the context. I particularly liked the analyses of subsequent landings in terms of what could have gone better/worse if more/less automation would have been used. And tracing bugs in the whole system to misunderstandings between people. Seems that no matter how complex the technology is (and how conscious and educated your users are), if the objective is to serve humans, you can never get rid of human desires, emotions and shortcomings. You do need to take them into account in your engineering, and merely noticing them is not enough. First human vs machine, then humans vs robots, now humans vs “AI” – this theme is going to be with us still for quite some time and this book does a great job exploring and elaborating on it.
