Flying in the early 20th Century was dangerous business. Aircraft were made of sticks and cloth and engines failed at alarming rates. Those who flew risked both accidents and death. However, some saw this stumbling attempt to master the skies as an opportunity to bring the human race forward. They had a vision of stylish travel in the skies combining comfort, speed and profit. Such was the vision of Transcontinental Air Transports Lindbergh Line that began the first scheduled coast-to-coast airline passenger service in 1929. Relive the adventure of that time and travel with the author as he flies what remains today of the Lindbergh Line.

The building of an airport in 1929 was not just developing a design and bringing together concrete and steel. It needed a radical design idea of how to safely bring heavier than air flying machines together with people as passengers. The questions involved defied answers. Such as how far can an aircraft safely fly? How many people can make up a safe flight? What should the design of an airport look like and how can man and machine fit together in a way that moved both forward? There were a thousand questions with few known answers. It took brave, intelligent, far sighted individuals to push the limits of imagination, machines, human stamina and vision to bring all of the needed elements together. These elements would build a great airport with a successful design for people and machines of flight. The thinkers realized that air was much like water and as such the skies could be like rivers or oceans that served major cities with commerce. The building of a great airport could become a “Giant Air Harbor” that could serve as a mighty air center of commerce. Such was the beginning of Port Columbus, the “Nation’s Greatest Air Harbor.”

Do your students consider taking a trip on an airplane an amazing, exciting adventure? If they don't now, they will after learning about how Charles Lindbergh ushered in the age of commercial flight in an historic flight from New York to Paris. They'll discover how Lindbergh's early flying experiences uniquely qualified him for his flight across the Atlantic. It's a flight they won't forget, and it will teach them to appreciate their next flight experience as they never have before.

In late May 1927 an inexperienced and unassuming 25-year-old Air Mail pilot from rural Minnesota stunned the world by making the first non-stop transatlantic flight. A spectacular feat of individual daring and collective technological accomplishment, Charles Lindbergh's flight from New York to Paris ushered in the modern age of commercial aviation. In The Flight of the Century, Thomas Kessner takes a fresh look at one of America's greatest moments, explaining how what was essentially a publicity stunt became a turning point in history. Kessner vividly recreates the flight itself and the euphoric reaction to it on both sides of the Atlantic, and argues that Lindbergh's amazing feat occurred just when the world--still struggling with the disillusionment of WWI--desperately needed a hero to restore a sense of optimism and innocence. Kessner also shows how new forms of mass media made Lindbergh into the most famous international celebrity of his time, casting him in the role of a humble yet dashing American hero of rural origins and traditional values. Much has been made of Lindbergh's personal integrity and his refusal to cash in on his fame, but Kessner reveals that Lindbergh was closely allied with, and managed by, a group of powerful businessmen--Harry Guggenheim, Dwight Morrow, and Henry Breckenridge chief among them--who sought to exploit aviation for mass transport and massive profits. Their efforts paid off as commercial air traffic soared from 6,000 passengers in 1926 to 173,000 passengers in 1929. Kessner's book is the first to fully explore Lindbergh's central role in promoting the airline industry--the rise of which has influenced everything from where we live to how we wage war and do business.

These essays in celebration of the Wright brothers' first flight 100 years ago grew out of presentations by a group of prominent scholars in 2003 at a conference sponsored by the NASA History Division and held at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, Ohio. The volume focuses on the careers of some of the many men and women who helped to realize the dream of flight both through the atmosphere and beyond. These accounts are original and compelling because they examine the history of flight through the lens of biography.

A compilation of 114 classic essays from Gore Vidal. "A marvelous compendium of sharp wit and independent judgment that confirms his status as a man of letters." —Publishers Weekly From the age of Eisenhower to the dawning of the Clinton era, Gore Vidal’s United States offers an incomparably rich tapestry of American intellectual and political life in a tumultuous period. It also provides the best, most sustained exposure possible to the most wide-ranging, acute, and original literary intelligence of the post–World War II years. United States is an essential book in the canon of twentieth-century American literature and an endlessly fascinating work.