Aircraft carrier aviation - the art of flying combat aircraft off the deck of a ship for operations and landing back aboard afterwards - is now over a century old, having evolved beyond all recognition from its halting beginnings. Pioneers such as Eugene Ely and Edwin Dunning faced a high risk of death with every attempted take-off or landing but by 1950, carrier operations for air defence, ship-killing, anti-submarine and onshore strike had developed into a sophisticated but routine matter shaped by new pioneers like Eric 'Winkle' Brown. Carrier Aircraft: The Prop Era looks at the machines, people and operations that built this dream into reality from the first tentative experiments before the First World War, via the pivotal actions of Taranto, Pearl Harbor and Leyte Gulf to the Korean War, before advent of the jet age.