In the late 1930s, while Europe became embroiled in another war, General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold sat at the head of the United States Army Air Corps and did the math. He didn’t like the answer. Arnold believed, correctly, that the first thing you do when you need an air force is teach a lot of young men to fly. The second thing is build airplanes. The third thing is everything else. The United States was not going to have time to do any of it in the sequence an orderly mind wou

Oklahoma produced an extraordinary generation of aviators between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second. Some of them are famous. Some of them should be. A few of them are connected to the aircraft in this hangar in ways that still surprise me when I trace the threads. This is their story...