Historian, Narayan Sengupta, will discuss the origins of the United States Air Force and the earliest fighter pilots including Eugene Bullard, Eddie Rickenbacker, and Quentin Roosevelt.
Quentin was Theodore Roosevelt's youngest son and the only member of a Presidents family to be killed in combat. Before his death, Quentin stayed at the home of Narayan Sengupta’s great-grandmother in France, home to the 1st Pursuit Group – America’s first fighter squadrons.
Narayan Sengupta is a historian and database expert. He comes from a family of combat veterans and historians. He grew up attending airshows, visiting battlefields and reading history. He is trilingual and loves to travel with his family. He worked at IBM, Coca-Cola, Hewlett Packard and Alltel before starting NFI (www.nfiweb.com), a business intelligence and database firm in Atlanta, Georgia. Narayan has a BA in history from Emory University and MBA from Georgia State. He has written five books on air combat, tanks, and POWs. He has authored articles for newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals and websites. His websites, www.USAWW1.com and www.Peachmountain.com/5star have had millions of visitors. Narayan organized the only 90th Anniversary commemoration of the US Air Force’s first combat operations in 2008 and founded Smyrna, Georgia’s annual Veterans Day event. Though a civilian, he is a proud member of the Smyrna Veterans Committee and is an Advisor of the Georgia World War I Centennial Commission. He is featured in a new documentary about the Lafayette Escadrille, a French air force unit populated by volunteer American pilots during WWI.
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