Jenny: The Airplane that Taught America to Fly

Barely 40 years separate the Wright brothers' flight and those of the first jet aircraft. The World War II pilots who were the first to fly those jets and who would later become the first airline pilots, learned to fly in little cloth and wooden biplanes, the aircraft of the 1920s and 1930s.

One such airplane was the Curtiss JN4 "Jenny," known as the "Model T of airplanes" because it was the first aircraft to be mass-produced. The Jenny was built in large numbers during the World War I; after the war, surplus Jennys flooded the market, becoming the airplane of choice for barnstormers and early airmail pilots-and the one in which famous aviation pioneers, from Charles Lindbergh to Amelia Earhart to Bessie Coleman learned to fly. Jenny is the story of this remarkable airplane. Told from the point of view of an early pilot, it imagines the experience of flying a Jenny, and illustrates how an aircraft was made during a time when building airplanes was a craft.

Besides being beautiful objects, these little airplanes are simple enough that it is easy for young readers to understand not only how they were built, but how their control surfaces work and how they fly. In later decades airplanes would get bigger and heavier, fly faster and higher, but even the most advanced swept-wing jet traces its lineage back to the earliest little airplanes of cloth and wood.