At the San Diego Air & Space Museum, our collections holds thousands of aircraft manuals.  In general, these manuals can be broken down into two major categories.  The first type is flight manuals, which pilots and crew use to learn how to fly an aircraft.  An important subset of these manuals is emergency procedure manuals, which pilots can quickly reference when things go south in a hurry.  The seond major type of manuals is those that have to do with maintenance.  These can be very extensive and detailed, but are of great use to those skilled mechanics keeping the aircarft safe.  Luckily, we have had some of these manuals digitized and placed on Archive.org.

Early Pilot's manuals, like this one for the Naval Aircraft Factory N3N, did not go into much detail, and gave the pilot just enough informaiton to take to the air.

Similarly, the Ryan ST pilot's "Operation" manual was not that in-depth! 

This T-34 Flight Manual certainly shows how much more detail pilots could expect as planes became more modern.

Two of our oldest digitized manuals are those for the DH-4 and the Ryan SC.  A quick look at these manuals will show that they are long on facts but short on illustrations! 

The "Illustrated Parts Manual" for the McDonnell F3H Demon lists every part in the aircraft in case they needed to be replaced.  As aircraft got more complex, so did the manuals, as this one is well over 800 pages.

The Convair 880 Maintenance Manual was so extensive it had to be divided into 3 volumes.

Two very rare manuals in our collection is one for the once top secret Norden Bombsight and for Project Mercury.

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