Whether you are interested in the career of an individual air-man or woman, researching medals awarded to a pilot or crew member or just want to know more about a particular squadron or operation, this book will point you in the right direction. Assuming that the reader has no prior knowledge of the air force, its history or organization, Phil Tomaselli explains which records survive, where they can be found and how they can help you in your research. He also recommends resources available online as well as books and memoirs. Each era in air force history is described, from the pioneering days of early aviation and the formation of the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War to the creation of the Royal Air Force, its operations during the Second World War and its postwar development. The author explains the evolving organization of the air force in each period. He also provides pointers and examples which should help researchers find the records of units and bases that individuals served in.

Samuel Hynes served as a consultant on "The War", directed and produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, and appears on camera in several episodes. "The War" is a seven-part, 14-hour documentary series that debuts on PBS on Sunday, September 23, 2007. Sam Hynes was eighteen when he left his Minnesota home for navy flight school in 1943. By the time the war ended he was a veteran Marine pilot, still not quite twenty-one, and had flown more than a hundred missions in the Pacific theater. In this eloquent narrative, by turns dramatic, funny, and elegiac, Hynes recalls those extraordinary years during which he came of age. he makes real the places—the training fields and the liberty towns and the Pacific islands, and the people—the other young pilots, the girls and the young wives, even the enemy pilots. He remembers friendship, and the excitement and tedium of war, the high exhilaration of flying, and the dying. More than a tale of combat, Flight of Passage is a story of one boy's growth to manhood in the turbulent, testing world of war in the air.