The Sky's the Limit. a History of the U.S. Airlines. the Romance of the Pioneer Days, Political Scandals of the 20s...a Success Story With Problems

On January 21, 1970 – 66 years after the Wright brothers’ biplane floundered off the sand dunes at Kitty Hawk – the Boeing 747 superjet, the largest commercial plane every built, streaked from New York to London in its first scheduled passenger flight. Set to debut in the mId-seventies; the Boeing 2707, a supersonic jet which will beat the sun across the United States. Few stories in the annals of American enterprise can match in excitement and suspense the tale of the bold men and big money that turned the Wright brothers’ lone sputtering plane into fleets of preening jets. In this sweeping narrative, Arch Whitehouse recounts the whole fascinating saga of the creation of the U.S. airlines. To most Americans in the early 1900s, the airplane was nothing more than the mount of barnstormers or the playboy’s expensive toy. But to a special few, the “winged charger” foretold dynamic new worlds. Daring and ingenious, they gambled lives and fortunes to prove the airplane’s worth and they color the pages of THE SKY’S THE LIMIT – like Ben Lipsner, laying the basic plans for America’s present-day network of domestic airlines as he ran the world’s first successful airmail system……Vern G. Gorst, living in a cheap Mission Street hotel in San Francisco while he single-handedly forged an eventual billion-dollar organization called United Airlines…….Donald Douglas, designing the famed DC-3, the first plane to make money carrying just passengers…….Juan Trippe, outwitting all competitors and obtaining for Pan Am every foreign airmail route for which bids were invited…….Bill Boeing becoming one of the most important figures in aviation when he decided to replace a cracked-up pontoon machine …….and Charles Lindbergh, almost single-handedly making the entire country air-conscious. The building of American, TWA, and Braniff; the rash of Boeing 707 crashes; the development of the DC-8 – these are just a few of the dramatic episodes you will read about in THE SKY’S THE LIMIT., ISBN13: B005DIASI8 ISBN10: B005DIASI8 Material Type: hardcover