Animals Aloft: photographs from the Smithsonian national Air & Space Museum

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s archives are world-renowned, but few might suspect that among over a million and a half photographs of airplanes, spacecraft, and famous aviators, the Museum has a veritable photographic menagerie of animals of all shapes and sizes. Animals Aloft presents a selection of photographs and anecdotes of this little-known aspect of aviation history. The author, in a witty and well informed text, describes the unique moments in the history of animal flight captured by the camera and artists’ engravings. Animals Aloft records and illustrates hundreds of animal aviators and co-pilots including fifteen cats, two chickens, one rooster and four chicks; eight cows, one chimpanzee, numerous dogs, innumerable horses (including an entire cavalry column), birds, four goats and a spider. The bravest flew in legendary craft; the chicks in a Lockheed Constellation; the spider in the Skylab space station; the cows in a DC-3A, Kiddo in airship America; Gilmore the lion in a Lockheed Air Express 3; and Tailwind the woodchuck, who flew away in a Bellanca Sky Rocket and was never seen again. Meet Kiddo, the first cat to attempt a transatlantic crossing by air; Whiskey and Soda, lion mascots of the Lafayette Escadrille; Cher Ami, heroic pigeon of the Battle of Meuse-Argonne in World War I; Titina, the dog who flew over the North Pole twice; and Gilmore, lion mascot (and nervous passenger) of the dashing pilot Roscoe Turner. There are the tragic stories of Tailwind the woodchuck and Laika the space dog–and did Moritz, the Red Baron’s Great Dane, really suffer from airsickness? Wilbur Wright, Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Lindbergh, and James H. Jimmy Doolittle make guest appearances, as does Amelia Earhart–with Harpo Marx. And, amazingly enough, it turns out that pigs really can fly. Animals Aloft pays an affectionate and at times humorous tribute to all these wonderful animals in their flying machines. Allan Janus is a museum specialist in the Archives Division of the National Air and Space Museum, where he assists researchers and maintains the archives’ lighter than air (balloons and airship) files. He has organized several exhibits of archival material for the Museum, including Fauna in the Files, Airships in the Archives, and Army Green to Air Force Blue. He also wrote Dog is my Co-Pilot for Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine. Janus is also a widely exhibited photographer, whose work is represented in several museum collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Janus grew up in the Washington D.C. area, and currently lives in Washington Grove, Maryland, with two decidedly earth-bound cats, Max and Maxine.