Airline beginnings. The pioneers.

[MAD1]

Hi all, been offline for some months, busy buying a new home in the country. Am now settle in, it's heaven! From my new local library got a coffee-table book about the 100 year history of QANTAS. That spurred me to look for more books, got a good one about Hudson Fysh, one of the founders. He with a couple of other guys came back from WW1, having learnt to fly and were in aerial combat, with a passion to fly, and to try an airline startup. Very interesting read, repeated the world over, many startups failed. The first QANTAS aircraft was an Avro 504K, they flew it in 1921 from Sydney to their home base, Winton in outback Queensland, where QANTAS was born. It could carry two passengers. Amazing the stories of the trips, no airfields as such, frequent engine problems. Amazed at how hardy those pioneers were, I think today most guys would simply give up and walk away. Would like to one day when I get my sim going again, to recreate some of those early routes and flights. I know there are various nostalgia sim groups worldwide who do that.

[PhrogPhlyer]

The stories of the trials and tribulations of early aviation are absolutely amazing.

[MAD1]

Yes PhrogPhlyer, have read about the early airmail aviators in the USA, it was rather cowboy, many of them died. And who was that fella that had his 'little black book' of flight route tips as he said he wrote up 'so I wouldn't die'. And the beginnings of the big airlines, PanAm, Lufthansa, I read in my book that the first airline was Royal Dutch Airlines, established a couple of years before QANTAS in the 1920s. And BOAC in Britain. Amazing history.

[lnuss]

3 hours ago, MAD1 said:

And who was that fella that had his 'little black book' of flight route tips as he said he wrote up 'so I wouldn't die'.

Elrey Borge Jeppesen said that. His notes, of course, morphed into a commercial product that endures today as a preferred alternate to the U.S. government-published charts. And they've branched out into flight training publications and much more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elrey_Borge_Jeppesen

 

Probably my favorite book about the earlier days is Fate Is The Hunter by Ernest K. Gann, written about his 20 plus years of flying for the airlines (American for quite a while), including the pioneering efforts of world wide transport during World War II in what became the beginnings of the Air Transport Command. The movie of the same name isn't related at all to the book, and is rather hokey (IMO). But Gann did write some other books about his experiences, in the form of fiction. Island In The Sky is about an aircraft that went down in the arctic and their efforts to find it. A movie based on the book starred John Wayne. The High And The Mighty is another book (also made into a movie starring John Wayne) about a problem encountered on a trip to Hawaii. Both of these were based on (but embellished) actual happenings that he documented in Fate Is The Hunter.

 

And for those who haven't seen it, The Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines; Or, How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours and 11 Minutes is a fun movie that also gives a good look at a very early period. A quote from Wikipedia:

 

Quote

Based on a screenplay entitled Flying Crazy, the fictional account is set in 1910, when English press magnate Lord Rawnsley offers £10,000 (equivalent to £1,090,000 in 2021) to the winner of the Daily Post air race from London to Paris to prove that Britain is "number one in the air"

 

Though it's a comedy, there is a lot of authentic material and it's an interesting look at that period.

[PhrogPhlyer]

3 hours ago, MAD1 said:

Amazing history

I've been reading more about lesser knows (in the US) aviation history, and have become fascinated with JRD Tata, father of aviation in India. An amazing man with an even more amazing history.

 

https://www.tata.com/about-us/tata-group-our-heritage/tata-titans/jrd-tata

[PhrogPhlyer]

18 minutes ago, lnuss said:

Though it's a comedy, there is a lot of authentic material and it's an interesting look at that period.

Fun movie, with really wonderful aircraft footage.

[MAD1]

Yes, Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines is a classic movie. And back then when making movies, no computer graphics, the 'props' were often real aircraft (perhaps newly built mockups, perhaps flyable) and filmed for real in the air. Yes, I remembered last night the 'little black book' was Jeppesen's (as the Wikipedia article explains), read about that in my FS2000 book that came with the CDs in the package.

[MAD1]

Hi all, am I not looking correctly in this newish FlightSim website, but I don't see any recent activity in 'Newcomer Services' or here in 'The Outer Marker'. Has the world gone quite? Oh, maybe it's partly due to the northern hemisphere summer vacation period just ending? I always enjoy browsing the forums over my morning coffee (often more satisfying then the news on TV, I don't read newspapers anymore, they're really old-fashioned!) I noticed this a couple of years ago. Presume all you northern hemisphere blokes get more active once the season changes and it gets cold, time to get active indoors etc.

 

Re history, just finished reading a good read, 'Sully', 340 pages, Chelsey B. Sullenberger III landing his US Airways Airbus A320, flight Cactus 1549, in the Hudson River, New York, 15 January 2009, a 5 minute 34 second flight, after hitting geese which shutdown both his engines!. I remember watching it all on TV.

[jgf]

Well, the US has just entered its period of national religious holidays, aka "football season".  Being the only heathen in the country, i am still here.

 

But summer is usually a slack time for online activity;  school is out, people taking vacations, and generally just getting outside more.

 

If you're not already familiar, I recommend the writings of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.