Biographical and corporate files, scrapbooks, and miscellaneous materials collected by the institute between 1939 and 1962. Includes correspondence, memoranda, manuscripts of articles and speeches, reports, biographical questionnaires and sketches, genealogical records, financial reports, broadsides, charts, press releases, newspaper clippings, blueprints, cartoons, maps, aeromedical and aeronautical reproductions, airplane specifications, prints, engravings, illustrations, sketches, photographs, memorabilia, printed matter, and other records relating to aviation and aeronautics collected and maintained by the institute prior to its merger with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Items of special interest include Thomas Jefferson's letter concerning the prospects of air flight (1822); Edmund Charles Genet's letters (1826-1827); Walt Whitman's notes on aviation (1850); Victor Hugo's letter sent from Paris by balloon during the siege of the Paris Commune (1871); files of T.S.C. Lowe including correspondence with Joseph Henry, George Gordon Meade, and Edwin McMasters Stanton; a 1904 letter by Theodore Roosevelt to Walter Wellman (1904) concerning a possible flight to the North Pole; a 1917 letter written by Franklin D. Roosevelt pertaining to ballooning; and Charles A. Lindbergh's application for the Orteig Prize awarded to the first person to fly nonstop from New York to Paris.

Includes biographical files for Henry Harley Arnold, Thomas S. Baldwin, Louis Blériot, Richard Evelyn Byrd, Clarence D. Chamberlin, Octave Chanute, Glenn Hammond Curtiss, Alexander P. de Seversky, James Harold Doolittle, Amelia Earhart, C.G. Grey, Frank Hawks, Henry Allen Hazen, William S. Henson, Maurice Holland, Howard Hughes, John Jeffries, Sir Charles Edward Kingsford-Smith, Alexander Klemin, Roy Knabenshue, S.P. Langley, Charles A. Lindbergh, T.S.C. Lowe, Johnny Mack, Glenn L. Martin, James V. Martin, William Mitchell, Auguste Piccard, Wiley Post, Eddie Rickenbacker, Alberto Santos-Dumont, T.O. Selfridge, Igor Ivan Sikorsky, A. Leo Stevens, John Stringfellow, J.T. Trippe, Edward Pearson Warner, Orville Wright, and Wilbur Wright. Files of T.S.C. Lowe include correspondence with Joseph Henry, George Gordon Meade, and Edwin McMasters Stanton.

Corporate files are composed primarily of newspaper clippings and printed materials, and include files for many American aircraft corporations. The scrapbooks contain a variety of materials concerning aviation and aeronautical history ranging from balloons and the Zeppelin to the development of the modern military air force and commercial airlines. Includes a set of scrapbooks concerning the Wright brothers.