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The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World
Avery
October 2010
On Sale: October 14, 2010
272 pages
ISBN: 1583334025
EAN: 9781583334027
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The captivating story of the titans, engineers, and pilots
who raced to design a safe and lucrative passenger jet. In Jet Age, journalist Sam Howe Verhovek explores the advent
of the first generation of jet airliners and the people who
designed, built, and flew them. The path to jet travel was
triumphal and amazingly rapid-less than fifty years after
the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk, Great
Britain led the world with the first commercial jet plane
service. Yet the pioneering British Comet was cursed with a
tragic, mysterious flaw, and an upstart Seattle company put
a new competitor in the sky: the Boeing 707 Jet Stratoliner.
Jet Age vividly recreates the race between two nations, two
global airlines, and two rival teams of brilliant engineers
for bragging rights to the first jet service across the
Atlantic Ocean in 1958.
At the center of this story are great minds and courageous
souls, including Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, who spearheaded
the development of the Comet, even as two of his sons lost
their lives flying earlier models of his aircraft; Sir
Arnold Hall, the brilliant British aerodynamicist tasked
with uncovering the Comet's fatal flaw; Bill Allen, Boeing's
deceptively mild-mannered president; and Alvin "Tex"
Johnston, Boeing's swashbuckling but supremely skilled test
pilot. The extraordinary airplanes themselves emerge as
characters in the drama. As the Comet and the Boeing 707 go
head-to-head, flying twice as fast and high as the propeller
planes that preceded them, the book captures the
electrifying spirit of an era: the Jet Age.
In the spirit of Stephen Ambrose's Nothing Like It in the
World, Verhovek's Jet Age offers a gorgeous rendering of an
exciting age and fascinating technology that permanently
changed our conception of distance and time, of a triumph of
engineering and design, and of a company that took a huge
gamble and won.
No awards found for this book.
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