Home Divider Children's Books Divider bar Portfolios Divider bar Bio Divider bar Making a Book Divider bar Downloads Divider bar News and blog Divider bar Contact
Previous Divider bar Next  
   
  Up in the Air image  
   
 

UP IN THE AIR: THE STORY OF THE WRIGHT BROTHERS

by Brian Floca


Ages 8 and up.

Breakfast Serials.

Up in the Air: The Story of the Wright Brothers is an 18-chapter illustrated story published by Breakfast Serials. Up in the Air has run in serial form — one or two chapters appearing per week — in over 120 newspapers nationwide.

(Up in the Air is not available as a book. You can contact your local newspaper to ask them to consider running it — more information on that option is available from Up in the Air's publisher, Breakfast Serials — or you can read it online in serial form at Instant Serials.)

Up in the Air follows Wilbur and Orville Wright from boyhood to 1908. It illustrates the genius, ambition, and stubbornness that led to the brothers’ first brief flight at remote Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903. The story then follows the brothers back home to Dayton, Ohio, and eventually to France, where in 1908 Wilbur made the first real public demonstrations of the brothers’ work. Those demonstrations were the moment of great triumph for the brothers — the moment at which the world recognized Wilbur and Orville as the inventors of the airplane.

Up in the Air is historical fiction. It aims to bring immediacy, uncertainty, and risk to what may be a familiar story. At the same time, a goal of Up in the Air is to be true the ideas, events, motives, and methods that led to Wilbur and Orville Wright’s inventions. Source materials included The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright: Including the Chanute-Wright Letters and Other Papers of Octave Chanute, which offer a fascinating, over-the-shoulder view of the invention of the flying machine. The story was vetted by Tom Crouch, historian and author of numerous books and articles on the Wright Brothers, including the acclaimed The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright.


Click here to read more about Up in the Air and Breakfast Serials.

Click here to read a Newspapers in Education interview with Brian Floca about Up in the Air.

Click here to see photos and read about the Active Aeroelastic Wing project at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center: modern experiments with wing-warping—the method Wilbur and Orville used to control the roll of their airplanes—on a modified F/A-18 traveling at supersonic speed.