Walter J. Boyne (February 2, 1929 – January 9, 2020) was a retired United States Air Force colonel, combat veteran, aviation historian, and author of more than 50 books and over 1,000 magazine articles. A former director of the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, he served as Chairman of the National Aeronautic Association and was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2007.

Early Life

Walter Boyne grew up the son of a poor family in East Saint Louis, Illinois during the Great Depression. He attended Holy Angels grade school where he first discovered an interest in writing. His love of flying was encouraged by dime novels of the day — particularly Robert J. Hogan's G-8 and His Battle Aces, which depicted "America's World War I Flying Spy" in air-to-air combat. He decided at a young age that he would become a pilot for the United States Air Force and focused his efforts to achieve that goal. Boyne earned a number of scholarships that enabled him to attend Washington University in St. Louis.

Military Career

In May 1951, after two years at the university, Boyne entered the Aviation Cadet program, where he learned a profound respect for the enlisted grades of the military. He started flight school in November 1951 and became the first of his class to solo. On December 19, 1952, he was awarded his wings and commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force.

While stationed at Castle Air Force Base in central California, Boyne flew the B-50 Superfortress as a member of the 330th Bomb Squadron of the 93rd Bomb Wing. In May 1954 he received orders to McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita, Kansas, for training in the B-47 Stratojet, which he flew for several years. In 1957, he returned to college and graduated with honors from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in business administration. He subsequently earned a master's degree in business administration from the University of Pittsburgh, also with honors.

Boyne returned to active flying as a nuclear test pilot with the 4925th Nuclear Test Group at Kirtland Air Force Base near Albuquerque, New Mexico. While at Kirtland, he became an aircraft commander in both the B-47 and the B-52 Stratofortress. In 1962, he participated in Operation Dominic, flying one mission that dropped a 5.4-megaton thermonuclear weapon over the Pacific.

Boyne served during the Vietnam War as commander of the 635th Services Squadron at U-Tapao Royal Thai Air Base, where he flew 120 combat hours as a C-47 instructor pilot. Colonel Boyne retired from the Air Force on June 1, 1974, with more than 5,000 hours in various aircraft.

The Writing Career Begins

Boyne began his writing career in 1962 while still in the Air Force. Tired of the repetitive aviation articles of the time, he chose to write about lesser-known people and airplanes, starting with an article on the Curtiss P-36. His article was accepted by the Royal Air Force Flying Review, a British magazine that paid him $29 — a moment of special pride for the new author. He went on to write for virtually every American aviation magazine, becoming a contributing editor to many of them.

National Air and Space Museum

In 1974, after retiring from the Air Force, Boyne joined the National Air and Space Museum as curator of air transport. Prior to the museum's opening in 1976, he was assigned responsibility for introducing all aircraft into their exhibits — including hanging them from the museum's overhead steel beams. Boyne was responsible for transforming the museum's dilapidated Silver Hill facility into the world's premier aircraft restoration facility, and organized the effort to rename it in honor of Paul E. Garber, a legendary curator of the National Air Museum.

Boyne was named acting director of the museum in 1982, and director on February 10, 1983. During his tenure as museum director, he:

• Founded the best-selling aviation magazine Air & Space / Smithsonian
• Orchestrated flights of an IMAX camera on the Space Shuttle
• Supervised the production of the IMAX films The Dream is Alive and On the Wing
• Worked with FAA Administrator Donald Engen to secure the land upon which the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center was built
• Arranged for the Space Shuttle Enterprise to be flown and stored at the museum in 1985
• Pioneered the museum's video disc program and patented the "Digitizer" automated storage and retrieval system

He resigned as director of the museum in 1986 to concentrate full-time on his writing career.

Author and Historian

Boyne's first novel, The Wild Blue (written with Steven Thompson), was published in 1986 and became a New York Times bestseller on the fiction list. In 1991, his book Weapons of Desert Storm became a New York Times bestseller on the non-fiction list — making him one of the very few authors to achieve bestseller status in both categories.

In 1998, Boyne co-founded the cable television channel Wingspan — the Air and Space Channel, which was purchased by the Discovery Channel a year later.

Over a career spanning more than five decades, Boyne authored more than 50 books and over 1,000 magazine articles on aviation. His works ranged from technical histories of individual aircraft to grand strategic narratives of air power, from biographies of legendary pilots to four acclaimed novels. His subjects included the B-47 Stratojet, the Me 262, the history of the helicopter, the Lockheed company, the Strategic Air Command, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and scores of individual aircraft and aviators that might otherwise have been forgotten.

He described his philosophy of aviation history this way: "I believe that the only thing you find in archives is a record of what the last man wanted you to think. It is imperative to cross-check historical records with principals, where possible, and with independent sources."

Honors and Recognition

• National Aviation Hall of Fame — Inducted 2007
• Chairman, National Aeronautic Association — oldest national aviation organization in the United States
• New York Times Bestseller List — Fiction (The Wild Blue, 1986)
• New York Times Bestseller List — Non-Fiction (Weapons of Desert Storm, 1991)
• Author of foreword to numerous landmark aviation books
• Vice President, Fighter Pilot Productions
• Aerospace Expert in Residence, Discovery Communications

Personal Life

His first wife, the former Jeanne Quigley, died in 2007 after a 55-year marriage. Their marriage produced four children — Molly, Katie, Bill and Peggy — and five grandchildren: J.D., Grace, Walter, Charlotte and Charles. Boyne remarried on January 10, 2008 to Terezia Takacs.

Col. Walter J. Boyne passed away on January 9, 2020, in Calverton, Maryland, at the age of 90. His work stands as the most comprehensive and readable record of American aviation history produced by a single author in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.