Editorial Note: Led by Editor Dr Mike Hankins, From Balloons to Drones produces a monthly podcast that provides an outlet for the presentation and evaluation of air power scholarship, the exploration of historical topics and ideas, and provides a way to reach out to both new scholars and the general public. You can find our Soundcloud channel here. You can also find our podcast on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.
In our latest podcast, we interview Dr Laurence Burke II, the Aviation Curator at the National Museum of the Marine Corps. We ask how did the US get from the first flight of an aeroplane in 1903 to full-fledged military-capable aeroplanes in only short few years? Burke takes us through the people that made that journey happen. He explores the different approaches to the airplane made by the US Army, Navy, and Marines Corps, and why each of them went about exploring military aviation in a unique way.
Dr Laurence Burke is the Aviation Curator at the National Museum of the Marine Corps. He earned an undergraduate degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a master’s in Museum Studies from George Washington University, and, in 2014, a PhD in History and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University. Since then, he has taught history at the United States Naval Academy as a post-doc and then was Curator of U.S. Naval Aviation at the National Air and Space Museum for several years before starting the job at Quantico.
Header image: A Wight Model A arrives at Fort Myer, Virginia aboard a wagon for testing by the US Army, attracting the attention of children and adults, 1 September 1908. (Source: Wikimedia)
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