Wings Over the World: Tales from the Golden Age of Air Travel

Summary

"Nowadays catching a plane is as routine and unromantic as catching a bus, but back in the 1930s, before the war, civil aviation was a romantic, extraordinary world. To fly to Paris in the early 1930s you went to Croydon Aerodrome in Surrey, and caught a giant Handley-Page biplane that bounced along the grass airstrip so vigorously that seatbelts were most important of all before take-off. To fly to Africa in 1937 you went down to the docks in Southampton and boarded one of Imperial Airways' Empire flying-boats, which took you on a five-day aerial voyage to Durban via overnight stays at luxury hotels and refuelling stops on remote African rivers and lakes that had to be cleared of hippos and crocodiles before touchdown. When you crossed the Atlantic in wartime on a giant Boeing flying boat the navigator was poking his head out of a hatch and plotting your course by the stars. Now, in the style of his ""Tales of the Old Railwaymen"" books, Tom Quinn talks to ten veterans of this golden age of civil aviation: pilots, navigators, stewardesses and station commanders, all in their late 70s, 80s and even 90s, and records their reminiscences - of flying with Alan Cobham, of silver-service meals above the African bush, of booming radial engines, terrible turbulence and true seat-of-the-pants flying. Drawing on beautiful period posters and advertising, and nostalgic black and white archive photography, this book is both a work of nostalgia and a piece of social history right on the edge of living memory."