The Ghost in the blueprint

The true story of America’s vanishing aerospace pioneer and a fifty-year hunt for the truth. In 1916, while massive corporations spent fortunes trying to conquer the sky, a teenager in Los Angeles took a different approach. George Dewey White designed the "Baby White"—a minimalist, accessible monoplane powered by a motorcycle engine that anyone could build in their backyard. Before his twentieth birthday, he had a mail-order empire, his blueprints were serialized nationally, and he was standardizing the American DIY aviation movement. And then, he vanished. When the post-war aviation market crashed, the George D. White Company folded, and the brilliant young engineer seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. Mainstream history forgot him. The Ghost in the Blueprint is the incredible true story of a decades-long historical cold case. Triggered by a childhood memory of building the 1916 Baby White from a set of old plans, the search for the missing designer winds through midwestern flight schools, the Great Depression, and forgotten aviation corporations, culminating in a WWII draft card that finally blows the mystery wide open. Featuring original blueprint analysis, this book brings one of early aviation’s most elusive and prolific minds back into the light.