This hardback edition of "Vertical Challenge: The Hiller Aircraft Story" by Jay P. Spenser is signed by the late Stanley Hiller Jr., founder of Hiller Aviation Museum.

Vertical Challenge: The Hiller Aircraft Story focuses on a helicopter industry pioneer. The most innovative of the four companies that achieved volume helicopter production during the 1940s, it was the only one located West of the Mississippi, in northern California.

Not only did Hiller Aircraft build the longest-produced piston-engine helicopter; it was also the source of many innovative alternatives to conventional helicopters-flying platforms, ramjet helicopters, and cargo-carrying VTOL (vertical-takeoff-and-landing) planes.

Jay P. Spenser provides a highly readable combination of corporate history, technical history, and biography, tracing Hiller Aircraft through war and peace, depression and economic expansion, and final corporate closure. The company's founder and director, Stanley Hiller, Jr., was only nineteen years old when he made history with his XH-44, the first successful helicopter to use all-metal rigid rotor blades.

Appendices include specifications and performance of Hiller aircraft, serial and bureau numbers, and museums displaying Hiller aircraft.

Book is copiously illustrated with 80 photographs, as well as schematic drawings of Hiller aircraft.