It is a truth universally acknowledged that if a plane is being displayed in a museum, people will want to sit in the cockpit. However, this isn’t always possible, especially with some of the older aircraft on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. So the photographers on staff have done the next best thing: taken pictures showing a pilot’s-eye view. There are civilian and military aircraft, as well as spacecraft, and fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft. Each aircraft comes with a brief essay explaining its history, the provenance of the Smithsonian’s particular exemplar, and the functions and evolution of the various instrument panels.

I found this really interesting, with a good variety of aircraft. I did find it a bit hard sometimes to tell what instruments they were referring to—reading this requires a bit of flipping back and forth between the cockpit spread and the text of the essay. The later aircraft essays seemed to be clearer than the earlier aircraft ones in terms of providing signposts for the reader, or maybe by then I was just getting better at spotting landmarks on the instrument panels. Some of the aircraft had zoomed-in pictures that were described as “insets”, but they weren’t always inset, which was a bit confusing, and the inset photos did not have captions accompanying them to explain their relevance—again, requiring some flipping back and forth.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading this book, and it’s making me want to read more about space flight in particular. So I would recommend this to aviation enthusiasts. ( )

This is a magnificent book. It is much too rare that we get to see the cockpits of airplanes. Long and Avino have done an amazing job of shoe-horning a high resolution camera into cramped cockpits and producing beautifully detailed pictures. The text is just as wonderful. ( )