AIR TRANSPORT BEFORE THR SECOND WORLD TOUR **BIG SIZE**
Prix régulier 49,00 € TTC 6%
Characteristics
| Book cover finish | Hardcover ( square back binding ) |
| Special features | Dust jacket |
| Condition | Used good |
| Number of pages | 71 |
| Published date | 1975 |
| Language | English |
| Size | 25 x 35 x 1 cm |
| Author | Taylor, John W.R. |
| Editor | NEW ENGLISH LIBRARY |
Description
As the first words in this book relate, ‘The early history of the Zeppelin airships hardly seemed to be a happy augury for the start of a commercial passenger-carrying airline.’ Yet that is exactly what the Zeppelins did start, and in their four years of operation, from 1910 to 1914 – the first airline service in the world – they carried 34,028 passengers and crew, on journeys totalling some 107,000 miles, without any fatal accidents.
Inevitably, however, it was the heavier- than-air aeroplane, not the airship, which was to create the airline industry that we know today. Louis Bleriot, an example of whose cross-Channel Type XI monoplane forms such a fine frontispiece to this book, shown in 1909 that air travel from country to country was not only practicable but inevitable; through ten more years, by a world war, were to pass before the commercial transport of passengers by aeroplane began to develop in earnest.
Ironically, it was the war which helped to make this possible, and the first ‘airliners’ were little more than conversions of aircraft which, only a few months earlier, had been carrying guns and bombs instead of passengers.
The Atlantic routes, bridging the old and new worlds, were quickly seen to represent the ‘Blue Riband’ of the air, and were pioneered by such legendary fliers as Alcock and Brown, Lindbergh, Mermoz and, again, Zeppelin.
Other routes were blazed by other famous pilots, and newly created networks were flown by such vividly contrasting trans- ’port aircraft as the Ford and Fokker tri-motors, the H.P.42, the little F13 and giant G 38 from Junkers and the Short ‘Empire’ flying boats; and then in 1936, the ‘plane that changed the world’, the superb Douglas DC-3.
This book tells the story of them all, not forgetting the immensely valuable part played by the airmail companies and the world-wide air races such as the ‘MacRobertson’, all of which helped to ‘improve the breed’ and lead towards the jumbo jets and supersonic airliners of today and tomorrow.
Source : publisher's summary printed on the cover