"Keith O'Brien weaves together the stories of five remarkable women: Florence Klingensmith, a high school dropout who worked for a dry cleaner in Fargo, North Dakota; Ruth Elder, an Alabama housewife; Amelia Earhart, the most famous, but not necessarily the most skilled; Ruth Nichols, who chafed at the constraints of her blue blood family's expectations; and Louise Thaden, the mother of two young kids who got her start selling coal in Wichita, Kansas....

The size of the U.S. civil aviator community has been of interest to researchers, policy makers, and special interest groups. A strict definition for membership in the U.S. pilot population was used that was based on Scientific Information System principles. This approach provides methods for scientists to describe, quantify, and predict changes in this population over the 23-year study period. The Bioinformatics Research Team at the Civil Aerospace...