“THE CHALLENGING SKIES” is a highly satisfactory and satisfying popular level history. "War has been the making of aviation," RAF's General Bracker said after World War I, at the outset of two decades of peacetime competition in the air. This then is the story of Americans and Europeans rising to the challenge of the skies, flying the Atlantic, the Pacific, over the Arctic and the Antarctic, flying first, farther, fastest. All the great names in aviation history are here (Billy Mitchell, Jimmy Doolittle, Lindbergh, Byrd, Sikorsky, Curtiss, backers Orteig and Levine, Amelia Earhart, etc., etc); the great flying ships from The Spirit of St. Louis to the Hindenburg, the Pan Am Yankee Clipper to Britain's Spitfire. The development of aviation with Billy Mitchell plumping for a separate air arm, the advent of air mail and passenger service, is an integral part of the story, as is the development of the airplane itself as an instrument of peace and, at the close, war.