Private Air & Private AirMart | Know When to Fold 'Em

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The whimsically interactive new coffee-table book Paper Pilot enables you to get back in touch with that inner-child kamikaze.

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Books : Know When to Fold 'Em

An interactive coffee-table tome takes you back to your own salad days of aerospace engineering and test flights.

By: Eric Capper
August/Sept 07 , Page 2

Every plane owner remembers his first plane. You know the one — the plane that made you fall in love with aircraft design and gave you your first taste of what it was like to really soar . . . until you watched it dart into your classroom chalkboard and crumple to the ground as Mrs. Pennycakes shrieked: “That’s it, mister! The principal’s office!”

The whimsically interactive new coffee-table book Paper Pilot enables you to get back in touch with that inner-child kamikaze. Part flight-history guide, part paper-airplane kit, the handsome volume, from the new design company Éditions Aero-Dynamiques is filled to the bulkheads with facts, stats and stunning aerial color and vintage photos of 24 of history’s most regal fliers. Flip to the second half of the book and each iconic bird is rendered again, this time with its components spread on the page as if on your own scaled, perforated Boeing or Lockeed factory floor.

The soul of the enterprise is retired Air Force sergeant Ben Haynes. Selecting planes like a fine art collector, he chose only those crafts that sparked the imagination of the post–World War II generation. “Personally, I like the A-10, because that was the one I worked on the most extensively in my career,” he says. “But the XB-70 is my favorite. It comes together so well on that thickness of paper, and because it’s already a white plane, it has that silvery gloss to it. The whole thing was a labor of love. We were flying them around the office all day.”