INTO THE WILD BLUE YONDER

Egerton, a former Marine and air-traffic controller, presents a thorough history of the commercial airline industry in the United States.

As the author observes in this remarkably comprehensive account, the genesis of commercial flight took place during a particularly inauspicious time: the Great Depression. Few Americans could afford to fly, and most were wary of “these new fangled flying machines.” At first, paid flights focused on everything but conveying passengers—mail and freight transport, pest extermination, timber surveying, aerial photography, and many other innovative uses. A decade passed between the famous first flight by the Wright brothers and the first passenger paying for a regularly scheduled flight. Also, the experience of flying was primitive by today’s standards; there was no heating provided, the noise was extremely loud, and the trips weren’t much faster than traveling by rail. There also wasn’t a kitchen aboard a commercial airline until 1936. The normalization of commercial flight, the author points out, wasn’t an “an orderly, straightforward process”; new technology was required, as was colossal infrastructure, a new regulatory regime, and widespread acceptance of air travel. Egerton furnishes a minutely detailed account of all these transformations, including the roles played by important figures, such as Howard Hughes and Charles Lindbergh, who, at one point, was the “most famous and sought after man on earth.” Sometimes, readers may get lost in the dense thicket of granular information, as when the author supplies the physical specifications of a DC-7 airplane. This is a minor quibble, though, as Egerton’s work is a magisterial display of scholarly rigor, especially when one considers the diversity of the fields he covers in such a synoptic history. Moreover, the story of commercial air travel is a surprisingly dramatic one; readers will see this with clarity when Egerton expertly chronicles the use of airplanes during World War II. Overall, this is an erudite, panoramic, and compulsively readable work.

An engaging and impressively researched book about American passenger flight.